Decisions & Hair-Balls

The trouble with making significant decisions is you can't predict the outcome. Everything is so interconnected with everything else that it is absolutely impossible to know if doing this will turn out better than doing that. And sometimes even the definition of "turn out better" is hard to know. No wonder people go to fortune tellers or consult hair-balls. The task of making a non-trivial decision is so daunting that most of us figure a hair-ball might make just as good a one as we would have. And if it turns out bad. . .well, blame the hair-ball.

I suspect we tend to freeze up about decisions because we're afraid. We're afraid that if we make a "bad" decision, it will ruin our lives. I don't think that's the way it usually is, unless we're trying to decide whether or not to kill the person who just cut us off on the freeway. That sort of decision will ruin your life, but it's obvious. It's the important but not-so-obvious decisions that scare us. Should I take that job offer? Should I get married to this person? Should I change churches? Should I go back to school? Should I have children? I think that in reality (i.e. from God's point of view), there is not all that much difference between the choices for these kinds of decisions. What withers our souls is when we dwell too long in the nether-land of the in-between state. . .being double-minded and torturing ourselves to death over our indecisiveness. A friend of mine, who was giving me some pointers about writing, once said, "You can't edit a blank page." I think that is sound advice as it pertains to decision making as well.