The world gives us some extremely good advice for setting goals. Too bad we can’t follow it—at least not exactly.
The whole idea of goal setting pervades our world. “When you fail to plan, you plan to fail” ranks high among the business world’s pearls of wisdom. Smart executives set objectives for everything, from this morning’s meeting to the next product launch. Job seekers prepare for the inevitable interview question “Where do you want to be in five years?” Parents sigh over their adult children who “have no direction.”
There’s a lot of value in setting goals. It’s hard to make progress in anything without some idea of where you’re going. And yet, for people of faith, there is a pull in another direction as well.
In many faiths, we commend our lives entirely to God’s care and direction. Christians take their cue from Jesus in
What does all this mean for goal setting? Simply that the dynamic of our unfolding lives is different from the norm. We do not plan our future so much as we respond to a call. We aim not to strive for personal goals, but to seek and fulfill the Divine will.
Now maybe, if we heard God’s calling all at once, we could use goal setting to create a framework that would help us fulfill it. But to make matters even more complex, God seems to call us only a little at a time. How can we lay out detailed plans when we don’t know exactly where we’re going?
Instead, we engage in an ongoing, slowly emerging dialogue with God. Two or three years ago, I sensed a nudge to write. It unfolded gradually: poetry came first, then this blog, and finally, about a year and a half ago, a call to “write books.” I still struggle with what this means. I have to be sure I don’t glom my personal ambitions onto this call—can I earn a living this way (please), can I quit my job immediately and just write books (please please please), etc. Rather, I have to let the call unfold as it will, while preparing my heart—via prayer, meditation, dialogue with others, and silence—to hear it.
I think we can use goal setting to gently shape what we hear, to facilitate its taking on a concrete form. But for believers, there is another step that both precedes and pervades the goal-setting process: listening. By always listening to the Divine voice, we learn to hold our plans lightly, realizing that they may change or refocus according to the Will whose fulfillment, after all, is our ultimate goal.
2 comments:
and how does one listen when that absolute need to know where we are going, and what we envision our goals to be and whether they will even work out or if we are romanticizing them too much, is such a constant chatter inside the head that it's hard to know what is God and what is you wanting it to be God? In other words, how do I know if the extreme desires and passions I have are what I want or what God intends for me, or both, or neither? How ever does one sort all this out??
These are superb questions, and you could write a book about the answers. (Yes, it's on my future to-do list.) I suspect that no two journeys are exactly alike, which means it's hard to pin down a single good way to go about it.
Still, here are a few thoughts. Perhaps the most important factor in the whole thing is time. It's taken me two years just to get to the rudimentary point of first-drafting a book, let alone figuring out the rest of my life!
So the whole drama unfolds very slowly. But I do think there are things we can do. There's prayer, of course--our speaking to God but, more important, developing the practice of listening to God in silence. I've found it helpful to try things out a bit at a time, in low-risk ways, as you are already doing. And then maybe we just slowly determine where our bliss lies, and follow where it leads us. Oh, and the insight and wisdom (and maybe, to a less extent, advice) of others is invaluable. Somewhere in the confluence of these practices--and a few others that may be helpful--lies the path.
This sounds very ethereal, but my experience has been that the geography becomes clearer with practice, especially practice listening.
Does that make any sense?
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