How do we decide?

How do you decide on the BIG stuff? On where you should go to college or grad school? Or if this guy is the guy for you forever and ever amen? Or if you should move after 12 years of sweat, blood, tears, babies, memories, history, sharing, giving....move out of your house you have come to adore and have custom made everything and it has been touched, every single inch, by you or your husband, has been redeemed, has been called out and made beautiful again? Feeling like a baby you have helped raise.....

Not to mention the lovely "lane" (or alley) and our dear friends at the end of it... and more around the corners....and all the memories in between? Community is precious.

How do we make decisions....and what if we love God and want to love Him above all else? Because if God is God, then I want to do what He's doing. I don't want to do what He's not. I want His peace more than my plan. I want His gifts more than my greasy elbows and stained working hands. I want His shepherding more than my shifty heart.

Aren't we so complex with our hearts? Aren't we so layered? One minute feeling confident in a decision and the next deep fear and regret?!

God, help us give you ALL the layers. You hold all things together (Colossians 1:17)....even the complexities and the paper thin layers. Like honey in the fragile sweet phyllo layers of baklava.....you hold it all together. Sweet and delicious and complex. You hold.

We are thinking of moving...of digging...of building fresh up. Of creating and dreaming and making fresh and new but taking what we know so well from this 100 year old first-house we love so much that God gave us.

Because it's His, lest we gravely forget.

And we are asking questions like: How will this decision (or this move) enhance who God has called us as a family to be? A fantastic question...because it forces us to wrestle more deeply with who we are and how we want to live. Priorities and desires and wants and needs..... (great thoughts from my sister and brother in law)

And we think through seasons...and what are we in now....what there are "times" for....which there are times for everything...moving...staying...planting...reaping...(another dear friend shedding the season light...)

And we think through Who and not What regarding "foundation."

And we think through faith and fear and somewhere in between.

I don't want a house the Lord has not built. Laboring in vain sounds awful...just as David said. (Psalm 127:1)

Sigh. The push and pull. It's all held. He holds and He owns and He builds and He levels.

As you decide on the BIG things....what do you ask?