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I’m really pretty amazed at the continued sparring over the comments Glenn Beck made a couple of weeks ago regarding social justice and the Church (see here and here).  I sort of figured it would be something that would blow over after a day or two: another right-wing media figure spouting off some stupid remarks that get a fiery response from the Christian left and then after two days all that’s left is the smoldering embers on obscure blogs (like this one), but nobody really cares anymore.

What I find fascinating is that this one hasn’t burned away like previous ones.  Glenn Beck, instead of retreating or apologizing or actually thinking about the absurdity of his remarks, has heaped more fuel onto the fire by continuing to insist and emphasize his claim that the term “social justice” or “economic justice” in the church is akin to “Marxism,” “communism,” and “Naziism” and that if you hear such terms spoken in your church, you should run and hide and report your church to “the authorities” (sounds more Big Brother-ish than anything he’s fighting against!).

Now, I don’t want to just be another blogger going off on a tirade about how wrong Glenn Beck is…I don’t want to be the guy who’s helping to heap fuel on the fire…and I’m not going to try and defend the place of “social justice” or “economic justice” in Christianity or in the Church (mostly because I think it’s pretty plain to see if you actually read scripture…try Deuteronomy 15, Leviticus 25, Amos, or Micah…or for those of you who prefer the words of Jesus himself, try Matthew 23 and 25 or the entire book of Luke)…and most of all, I’m not going to try and weigh in on the national health care debate, the so-called “wealth distribution,” or any other issue (even thought I have lots of opinions).

But in an era of highly polarized politics and religion, I just want to toss out the question: Who is speaking for you?  Who is speaking for your Church?

Is it the Glenn Becks?  Is it the Pat Robertsons?  Is it the Conservapedias with their “conservative Bible project” (which is an abomination to me as an “aspiring Biblical scholar” and should be to anyone who wants to read the Bible well)?  On the other hand is it the “social gospel”?  Is it “tolerance”?  Is it President Obama and the Democratic party?

Or is it Jesus?  Do you (and your Church) stand above the polarized national debates and outside of American conservative/liberal culture to call out that culture wherever it needs to be called out?

I realize that most of the people that read this blog are probably a) my family or b) my friends who already mostly agree with what I think.  And so maybe this is futile or simply worthless. But I’ve got to get something off of my chest…

Our current national dialogue—be it regarding politics, religion, natural disasters, or basically anything—is riddled with sensationalism, fear-mongering, mud-slinging, misinformation, personal and national arrogance, and a whole lot more.  Every conversation, every issue is so clouded by hate and fear that there is no dialogue.  But worst of all, you have a bunch of people who are given a pulpit from which to preach slander and sheer distortions of the truth and of the Gospel!

The Gospel I read is a message of restoration, redemption, and renewal.  It is a story of hope and love and peace.  It is the story of God turning the world upside down with the coming of his son and the bringing of his Kingdom to earth.  That Gospel forces me to care about the poor and marginalized and to seek “economic justice” and “social justice.”  It forces me to care about the environment, to seek the preservation of species, the reduction of pollution, and the sustainability of my lifestyle. It forces me object to wars and oppression.  It forces me to sympathize, to understand and pursue relationship with those who are broken and sinful, even as I am broken and sinful. And it forces me to love those who disagree with me and to seek Truth and engage in civil dialogue and debate.

I’m pretty sure most people in the Church would agree with (most of) that.  I’m pretty sure that most of those who identify themselves alongside Jesus were cringing at Rev. Robertson’s words regarding Haiti and that most would also disagree on some level with Glenn Beck.  Yet, the mentality that they espouse—a mentality of suspicion, fear, individualism, selfish interest, American superiority, and capitalistic idealism—is destructive to the national dialogue, to the American Church, to the message of Jesus Christ, and to everything that we are called to be and do as Christians.  If we continue to tacitly endorse these folks and others like them (even if we think they represent the extremes) by our attitudes, our actions, or television viewing, our money, or our theology, then we are in grave danger of totally misunderstanding who Jesus was and of getting in the way of the Kingdom of God coming to earth.

You don’t have to be a “Christian leftist,” a “liberal,” a fan of Jim Wallis and Sojourners, or a “socialist” to agree with that.  You don’t have to give up Evangelical Christianity.  You don’t have to like President Obama.  You don’t have to give up on “conservative” stances on some issues such as abortion.  But you do have to seek to love your neighbor and promote truth-seeking and -telling…and I’d suggest that you prayerfully consider how those might impact how you view some other issues on our national table.

Who speaks for you and your church? Be sure it’s Jesus.

Yes, as we have just rolled over not one but two numbers on the calendar, I thought maybe we should take a look back at the past ten years to see where we’ve gone.  I mean, a lot has happened.  Ten years ago at midnight, I was standing on the hill above Twisp waiting for the lights to go out…oh, Y2K, you really threw us for a loop.

So here’s a list of the top ten best things (or at least interesting things) that happened in the past decade:

10.  I graduated from high school!  And college!  And grad school!

9.  Ran the London Marathon and broke the 2:40 barrier (also ran three other marathons this decade…shooting for ten in the next decade!)

8.  Played with a crazy monkey while living in Ecuador for a year, working at Covenant Bible College.  Also went spelunking with a one-legged man.  Also climbed a 19k+ ft mountain: Cotopaxi.

7.  Travelled all around Europe…from Norway to Greece and everywhere in between!

6.  More and more running…running in high school, running in college, running aftercollege…lots of good times, good races, good people…in the Mountains in Winthrop, on the beach in Santa Barbara, on Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, through the streets of London, through the hills of Thailand, getting chased by dogs in Ecuador, getting stress fractures in the summers…is it sad that I spend so much time at this activity?  I don’t think so.  It’s provided some pretty incredible moments.

5.  Went to Thailand for a four months and loved it…lived in a tribal village, ate great food, had crazy adventures.

4.  Spent a year in Scotland doing my masters degree.  Hung out with some great folks, explored higher theology, got started in professional coffee making.

3.  Worked on a llama ranch in Colorado for the summer after college.  Also fought forest fires for a couple of summers…hence my alter ego: Fuego.

2.  Spent a year with the Canby Community learning to live well.

1.  Learned a lot about life, about God, about people, about myself.

Goals for the next decade: 1.  Get a Ph.D., 2.  Run sub-2:30 in a marathon, 3. Spend another year living overseas, 4. Live well.

1. Sunrise was at 10am this morning.  Certainly, dawn arrived much earlier, but I still tend to get this feeling that I’m in some sort of ethereal time-warp.
2. Yesterday was the winter’s first ski.  It felt good.  I’m about to head out for the winter’s second ski.
3. Healing takes time.  One of the advantages of being up here at ACC is that I get to take advantage of professional counseling from the counseling center.  So I’ve been going.  And I’ve been realizing that some scars still run pretty deep.  But I’m also starting to see that maybe the point isn’t to get rid of them but to be shaped by them.  After I got a stress fracture in college from overtraining, I had to learn how to run again, how to train again…I couldn’t go about things in the same way and expect to not get hurt again…and even now, when I start training hard, that same spot, the left tibia, sometimes acts up and I have to be careful.  Maybe emotional injuries work the same way.  Be careful, learn from it, be shaped by it, but never forget it, never act as though it isn’t still a deep part of me.
4. My application to Duke’s Ph.D. program is all submitted.  Now I get to wait around for a couple of months to see if I’m even in the running.
5. N.T. Wright is a phenomenal thinker.  I’m getting close to finishing Justification and though it’s a pretty heady book, I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to believe that maybe the message of Jesus is better than even we imagined.  I never used to like Paul much…but Wright is convincing me that I need to give him a new, better, more informed reading.
6. Somehow I’ve found myself “in charge” of organizing worship at the new The River Covenant Church plant here in Soldotna.  Challenging.
7. The semester is coming to an end.  Ethics was discussing food last week.  I ended on this topic because it ties together a lot of the other issues and shows how they are connected.  We are going to watch a documentary tomorrow, Food, Inc. I recommend that you all see it.  It will change the way that you think about what you eat and it demonstrates those connections to many other ethical issues.  Final exams next week.
8. I’m headed home in less than two weeks.  And by home I mean Portland and then Winthrop for a little while and then back to Portland to fly back here to Alaska.  Hope to see many of you then.

Happy Thanksgiving, friends!

And happy Black Friday Buy Nothing Day!

Well, we’re back to that time of year…the time when I start to feel a little bit anxious and uncomfortable and start blurting out things that are a little more barbed or more sarcastic than I intend…the time of joy and giving and celebration…and stress and over-spending and over-eating and (for some) too much family time.  Ah, the Holidays!

Last year, I perhaps crossed the line with my barbs and sarcasm.  So I am trying not to do that this year.  But as we come up on this pseudo-holiday that we call Black Friday, a day when we are encouraged to begin indulging ourselves beyond all that is reasonable, I would like to encourage us all to resist our impulses, take a deep breath, and think…

In my ethics class, I am currently talking about poverty.  On Monday, we discussed that currently, about half of the world’s population lives on less than two dollars per day.  Additionally, it so happens that in the U.S. we use approximately 30% of the world’s resources (for about 5% of the world’s population).  This seems a little bit disproportionate to me.

Last week in ethics, we talked about the environment.  Specifically, we talked about how our consumption rates are far, far above sustainable levels.  Now, sustainability is a hot word these days and it’s basically losing its meaning because it’s so overused.  But here’s the thing: we live in a world with finite resources.  Some of these resources are renewable but many are not renewable.  It’s easy to see that someday we will run out of those non-renewable ones.  But what is a little less clear is that we are using the renewable ones at rates far exceeding their ability to renew themselves.  This is especially a reality in here Alaska where many of the people live subsistence lifestyles and where their food resources are dwindling.

We’re also talking about economics.  Besides the poverty side, there is the simple fact that we as a culture are being told that our stuff is inadequate…our houses are inadequate…our lives are inadequate…we are inadequate.  And of course the only fix for these inadequacies is to buy things, to spend money on ourselves…then we’ll be happy!  Or will we…

I want to invite you all to join me in trying to see through this lie.  Join me this month in trying to live a simpler lifestyle, in celebrating Christmas as the time of the incarnation of our God who seeks restoration and justice and redemption and transformation, in reflecting upon the problems of poverty and the destruction of creation and doing something about it.

Here’s two ways to start:

1. Buy Nothing Day this Friday!:  Instead of falling into the temptation to go buy a bunch of junk on Friday, stay at home and read a book or bake some cookies or enjoy family or play some cards…just take a fast from the compulsion to buy, to want, to need, to consume.

2. Join the Advent Conspiracy: Get your church involved!  This is group trying to encourage each other to spend their Christmas money on local projects that help those in need…and also to just spend less!  Last year, my church in Portland was a part of this and a large chunk of money was donated to the city to help with projects for the homeless and for low-income neighborhoods.  Good ministry, yes?  Another thing that they focus on is clean water projects around the world.  Bad water kills about 1.8 million people every year.  And it’s such a easy and inexpensive problem to fix.  Advent Conspiracy estimates that it would take about $10 billion to fix this world problem.  How much did Americans spend on Christmas last year?   About $450 billion. That means that if we just diverted a little over two percent…2%!!!!!!…of our Christmas budget to clean water projects, we could basically solve this problem!

I don’t say all this to sound self-righteous.  As one dude once said, “I haven’t attained perfection and in fact I am the worst of sinners”…or something like that.  I’m not claiming that I spend my money well or that I don’t get caught up in consumerism.  But I am trying to see my materialistic compulsions for what they are and to do better.  I can’t solve poverty and hunger…but if I can give a cup of water or a piece of bread to “the least of these”…well, it’s something.

(This one’s for you Candice!)

I’m back.  The big trip to Shaktoolik actually happened (!!!) and though it was a short weekend experience, it was very valuable and enlightening as I try to learn to better serve this group of students with whom I have the privilege to work.

The weekend was much like any other high school retreat.  Kids from all over Norton Sound (that’s the part below the old man’s nose if you look at a map of Alaska) came to Shaktoolik—from Nome, Unalakleet, Elim, and others—to take part.  We had the usual games, chapel services, small group time, and late nights (which took their toll on me as I’m now fighting off sickness…boo).  I saw some pretty interesting sights: flying over the frozen Yukon River, the beginnings of the ocean freezing over (there was slush and ice washing up on the frozen shore), the store where prices were anywhere from two to three times “normal” or more (the kids dropped $3.50 for energy drinks like Rockstar, which are pretty popular up here).

The most “enlightening” part of the weekend, though, had to do with the theological landscape.  Being in the village was interesting and seeing the way they lived, but it’s not extreme poverty…I’ve seen far worse in Thailand and Ecuador.  The Alaska Natives in these villages generally live a subsistence lifestyle, and they seem to do alright.  But the theology and worldview was very different and at times even disturbing.  I have seen student papers and heard students speak with what appeared to be a very strong dualistic sense of the world—a very stark good vs. evil, heaven vs. hell, God vs. Satan viewpoint—but now I understand a little bit better how they have come to that point.  It’s what is in the villages.

As one of the other ACC staff told me the other day (a guy who is himself native), there is a great fascination with end-times stuff (eschatology) and often a very escapist mentality (the idea that this life is just a way-point that we have to suffer through before we can get to heaven).  Frankly, I was deeply disturbed and distressed by this.  I saw and heard some examples of pretty poor biblical interpretation to support theological ideas that I believe are flat out wrong.  It seemed that all weekend long the message was about sin, death, judgment, Hell, Satan.  It was about us getting out of here, about how we can hardly wait for Jesus to come back and save us from whatever it is that we are stuck in.  But, if this is merely a testing ground to see if we are good enough to make it to heaven (even if being “good enough” only means that we have to believe in Jesus), then we are all just in purgatory…we’re paying our dues, putting in our time suffering.  But this is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

It seems that I keep coming back to this point in everything that I talk about, but the Gospel is about Life (yes, with a capital “L”).  It is about us living up to everything that God created us to be…about us realizing our true humanity…humanity as we’ve never experienced it before.  It’s not just sin management.  It’s not just good news for the elect few.  We don’t seek forgiveness and salvation simply for the remission of sins.  We do so because in repentance and forgiveness God offers to us and we embrace that true Life…life as it was meant to be lived, as we were created to live it, our true humanity!  I fear that the church has for too long framed the Gospel in the negative, by saying “do this/believe or else.”  Might we return to viewing the Gospel as a positive, as saying “do this/believe because it is inherently better than life in that other way.”  Might we do better, might we better serve Christ if we offered something to people instead of threatening them?

I am certain that the Gospel is better than simply a get out of Hell free card…I know that it is, that is has to be truly good news.

I’m in the middle of N.T. Wright’s Surprised By Hope.  It’s a good book.  I recommend it.  It’s a good rethinking of some of Christianity’s most deeply-held and perhaps most misunderstood doctrines…namely Heaven, Hell, resurrection, and salvation.  But I stumbled across a quote the other day…a statement on the idea of the trinity in the middle of a chapter on the ascension (this wasn’t even the point of his argument here, but it was great so I wanted to share it):

The Trinity is precisely a way of recognizing and celebrating the fact of the human being Jesus of Nazareth as distinct from while still identified with God the Father, on the one hand (he didn’t just “go back to being God again” after his earthly life), and the Spirit on the other hand (the Jesus who is near us and with us by the Spirit remains the Jesus who is other than us). (p. 114)

I love the language of “distinct from while still identified with” and “the Jesus who is near us and with us…remains the Jesus who is other than us.”  I think it’s that he starts with Jesus where in my experience we tend to start with God the Father.  There’s just something about that language that affirms that Jesus came, that he is God and yet somehow fully a limited human being, and that he is still present and dwelling with us…but is not us.

I’ve been dealing lately with trying to get my students to think more abstractly.  This has come out in my ethics class as I try and get them to let go of black and white notions of right and wrong and think in the broader terms and categories that Jesus was always moving us to.  But I’ve also been trying to get them to see the idea of the trinity as an image, a metaphor, an analogy that helps us to learn about and understand a bigger, broader, more abstract truth that our finite minds cannot truly comprehend.

I was subbing for the OT professor last week and some students kept substituting “Jesus” for “God” and I was left trying to get them to see that, yes, Jesus is God then and now and forever, but that he also remains distinct then and now and forever.  And while the whole of the OT story brings us to Jesus, while it finds its fulfillment in Jesus, to place Jesus, as Jesus the incarnate human son, into the Old Testament is to insert a foreign element into the text.  Jesus is the incarnation of God and to take away his humanity, either by saying “well he was present there in the Old Testament” or by believing that Jesus “knew” everything or in any other way making him out to be omni-present, omnipotent, or omniscient destroys the amazing and incomprehensible beauty of the incarnation.

I finished two books yesterday, very different but both informative and interesting in their own way: Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Peter Enns) and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (Michael Pollan).  A week or two ago, I finished another book by Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  In a way, the two Pollan books go together…but first let’s talk about Enns’ book.

Inspiration and Incarnation has been a slightly controversial book in Evangelical and Reformed circles (at least among academics) because it calls into question some assumptions about the doctrine of inspiration of scripture.  Basically, it asks three questions: 1) why, if the Bible is the Word of God, does the Old Testament resemble other Ancient Near Eastern literature?, 2) why, if the Bible is the Word of God, does the OT at times contradict itself?, and 3) why, if the Bible is the Word of God, do the NT authors handle the OT in such strange ways.  Enns’ basic point throughout the book is that we hold assumptions that are really off-base and that these need to be corrected.  For example, why do we insist that for the Bible to be God’s word it has to look entirely different from other literature written around the same time?  The probable answer to this question is that we believe that Bible should be unique.  But to combat such an assumption (and given the evidence available to us, it is a faulty assumption), Enns offers an analogy: the Bible is God’s incarnate word, just as Jesus is God incarnate as a human person.  And so the Bible, God’s word, takes on forms which would have been familiar to the ancient readers, forms that they would have understood, forms which speak to them in their time and make sense of their world for them…even if that means that we in the 21st century have to do a bit of work to make them relevant to our situation.  Now, I’ve heard many objections to such arguments, objections which try to hold onto the idea of the Bible being totally and utterly unique…but the more time I spend studying the Bible in its original languages and studying its literary-historical setting, the more I find that I have to question my assumptions.  I (and Peter Enns as well) firmly believe that the Bible is the word of God, but I also believe that God has given me the intellectual capacity to view evidence and process that evidence in a logical and rational manner; I don’t believe that I should have to suspend intellectual honesty to believe in God or in Christian doctrine.  And so, as I read a book like I&I and when I study the Bible and its context, I have to be willing to let that inform my beliefs about them;  I cannot start with doctrine or dogma and simply look for evidence that supports that belief while ignoring evidence that speaks against it.  I’m not one to say that science and rationality should rule all, but when there are simple facts (like that there are other ancient flood narratives or that Kings and Chronicles have very different things to say about certain Israelite rulers), I believe that we must ask the hard questions so that we can move closer to God’s truth…otherwise we end up excommunicating Galileo.

Michael Pollan’s books are very different subject matter.  They talk about food.  And more specifically our food systems.  The Omnivore’s Dilemma traces four different “food chains” in an effort to understand where and how our food is produced and the effects that this has on our bodies, our communities, our economy, our environment, our world, and our lives.  It’s a story of who we are as a people group and the problems inherent in an out-of-sight, out-of mind food system.  It suggests that things are messed up and that we are destroying ourselves and screwing with everybody else on the planet, too.  I would summarize the basic point as that the more industrialized the food system becomes, the worse off everything becomes—from our health to the environment to our relationships amongst our communities.  Maybe it’s an overly idyllic vision that he sets forward, but I think it’s something worth working for, because as he shows in the second book, In Defense of Food, our health depends on it. IDOF is more of a pseudo-scientific book on the effects of this industrialized food culture, which treats food as a source of nutrients instead of as something to be enjoyed for its own sake, on our health.  We live with this broken system where worthless, empty calories (i.e. corn) are made incredibly cheap through government subsidies and inserted into every product that we consume.  While the foods that are actually good for us (fruits and vegetables) are much more expensive because they lack the subsidies.  And so the only ones that can really afford to eat the healthier foods are the (relatively) wealthy while the less-well-off are left to a diet that makes them less healthy (and unable to afford health care?…but that’s another whole debate).

Ultimately, this problem is what I’ve been trying to work out in my own life over the past couple of years: how do I eat well responsibly, not just as a luxury, so as to make a statement about the state of our national food system?  I don’t eat meat because I think that system (at least at the industrial level) is the worst part of the food system…but up here in Alaska, that becomes more of a luxury because the produce is so much more expensive.  I try to eat mostly local and in season foods (again, a bit difficult and becoming more so as we get to winter up here in Alaska).  I try to eat mostly more organic (luxury?).  But most of all, I’m trying to go back to basic, simple, non-processed, whole foods.  Maybe I’m not doing a whole lot of good with my tiny efforts, but maybe there’s also a lot of other folks out there…in fact, I know there are because I was living with a bunch of them until a couple of months ago in a city that encourages a lot of this sort of stuff.  We all had some different opinions on how to work it all out (I was the only vegetarian), but there was at least some effort there.

Anyway, I’d recommend any of those books.  I&I requires you to wade through a lot of examples, but perhaps worth the effort.  Pollan’s books are pretty easy reads, but I’d recommend looking at both of them…the second feeds off the first.  Live well friends.

It seems I’m becoming a full on preacher!  Ok not really, but I did give the “sermon” or “talk” in chapel today.  We are working through Luke’s gospel and so I got to revisit Luke 4, what I consider to be one of the more significant passages in the Gospels.  The short version of what I said is this:  God is not confined to how we think he should work…he is doing something new…so get on board with what he is doing, where he is doing it.  If you’re interested in the long version, check it out here.  For those of you who looked at my previous sermonizing experience, I used some of the same ideas and even a little bit of the same material, but it’s mostly new…so you should read it!

On Sunday, I was given the chance to preach my first sermon.  It went over pretty well and seems to have generated some “good” response, in that people seem to have found it rather challenging.  That’s kind of what I was going for.  I preached on the idea of a theology of life versus theology of death.  It’s some of the same ideas that I’ve talked about here, but a little more developed and organized.  Sadly, it didn’t get recorded…some error.  But I have the transcript, so if you are interested, check it out here.  And let me know your thoughts.

Leaving for Alaska on Monday…[nervous excitment].

I know that there are some who disagree with me on this, but in the debate between free will and determinism, I lie very far on the free will side.  I think that God sets choices before us.   I think that we have the freedom to do as we will, to shape our world as we desire it to be.  I think that there are bad choices, good choices, and better choices, but that they are ultimately ours to make.  I believe that God is more concerned with the sum of my decisions as they indicate who I am than he is with the individual choices themselves.

The reason all this has been going around my head is that I’m still in the job hunt.  I moved to Portland six months ago with the idea that I could work a menial job and be alright with it for a time, that I needed a period of time to sit back and breathe and try to gather some perspective on life.  But given my goal-oriented, define-myself-by-what-I-do nature, this has been tough.  And so while I’ve come to the point of saying I’m ok with working at Starbucks right now, I’ve kept coming back to the job hunt, looking for other opportunities.  Now I’ve got an application in that would sadly cause me to leave Portland for a time, I’ve got a couple of jobs to apply for that might keep me in Portland, and I’ve got Starbucks Coffee which would definitely keep me right where I am, a good option in that I can continue to focus on building community and finding ways to serve God in the mundane but bad in that I struggle with making this my identity and with holding a job simply to earn money.  Granted, option B would be ideal, having a job that I can feel good about that keeps me in Portland, but what if that doesn’t work out and I have to choose between options A and C?  Does God have a “will,” a single “call”?

This came to something of a head a few weeks ago when I had a couple of conversations that got me thinking about how I’m working to develop myself and whether I even know what I want out of life anymore.  I’ve been sitting in this stage of ambiguity, waiting for God to “open a door,” and yet what it really comes down to is laziness and insecurity because I don’t really believe that God works like this.  I don’t believe that God allows us to just sit around and wait for him.  I believe that he put the decision on us, that he says to us, ”I’ve shown you what is good.  All I require of you is that you live rightly, be loving, and walk with me.”  The rest is up to me.

I find that my tendency is to revert to this “open/closed door” mentality.  And it’s worked before.  When I was deciding on a college, there seemed to be a clear “open door.”  But that’s about the only time.  Every other major decision I’ve had, it seems that there was more than one option and that God would have been present in and worked through either one.  And even with the decision to go to Westmont, when that door appeared to open, I stopped pursuing the other options because it was easier when there was only one option that seemed clear.  And Westmont was good.  But maybe something else could have been good, too.

So I guess what I’m getting at in my long-winded manner is this: I want excuses for my decisions and so I often play the “God’s will” card.  As much as I/we say that I/we want freedom, I/we would really prefer that God would make the hard decisions for me/us, when really he is allowing me/us to choose who I/we want to be, allowing growth to come through the decision process.

Maybe job option B will work out for me.  Maybe not.  But if not, then I think it’s up to me to figure out where to go from there.  Either way, God will use me.  But it’s my choice as to whether I see his work in and through me no matter what I’m doing.