Guidance for the Long Road Ahead, Part 1

I have yet to meet a university student that is not constantly thinking about the future. As the transition out of adolescence continues, many of them, especially guys, do not seem too concerned about the immediate future, such as the next couple of hours or second half of the semester. Good examples: making a Taco Bell run at midnight instead of finishing the paper due the next morning, studying an extra hour for the final exam, or getting an extra

hour of sleep the night before rather than sleeping through class or doing something crazy like jumping over a car hood on a longboard or punching a reinforced window with a bare hand. I could go on and on. Say what you will about adolescent motivation but they will always find ingenious ways to hurt themselves. In spite of this short-term blindness, a kind of practical nearsightedness, young folks still have questions about what comes next: where will they live, what direction will careers will take, who to spend life with. Much of their quiet mental state is flummoxed with thoughts about the long-term future.

They want to find THE pathway, and hope that someone else will point it out to them. I will not just pick on millennials, because I see this tendency in most people's lives and in my own life, for that matter. Instead of discerning God's purposes for in life, there's a tendency rely on external "signs" to point the way. Seeking God's will has become a Christian ruse for paganistic divination. There are problems with this approach to the future at two levels: the finding the path and the path itself.

Finding the Path
Knowing one's future is the process of discernment, from the Latin meaning to "distinguish" or "sort out." The myth of discerning the future is illustrated well by the Sorting Hat of the Harry Potter universe. When Harry or Hermione arrive at Hogwarts, they along with all first year students take turns putting on the Sorting Hat which will whisper which of the four "houses" they will join. More recently, the Divergent series of young adult novels uses a similar process of determining what part of society an adolescent will join aided by a chemically induced dream state. I cannot help but wonder if personality inventories, strengths finders, and spiritual gift inventories are not the same kind of thing.

The Hebrew scriptures help us figure out a new way that is really an ancient way of knowing the future: listening for God's voice. In 1 Samuel 3, "little" Samuel hears a voice in the middle of the night, though the text is not clear about whether he was a child or a young adult, even though this image is perpetuated through outdated portraits like the one to the right by the 18th century artist John Singleton Copley. The young man, regardless of age, heard a voice calling to him in the middle of the night, and confused the Divine Voice for Eli, his elderly guardian. In his bewildered fear, Samuel runs to the old man, a washed-up and defeated caretaker of a remote holy site. The former prophet remembered enough to tell the young one to return to bed and respond to the voice.

To hear a voice is at the root of the word "obedience" in the Hebrew language. To be able distinguish God's singular voice evolved from the human capacity to pay attention. Daniel Levitin in The Organized Mind (2014) identifies the attentional filter as the cognitive process that helps human beings extract important information from a constantly changing environment whether it's bumps in a road to the hair color of a parent's child lost in a crowd to a divine calling whispered in the darkness of night. Levitin writes, "The human brain evolved to hide from us those things we are not paying attention to." (p. 11) Another way of describing this is Frederick Buechner's advice, "For God's sake, pay attention." If the focus is on the Divine, entering into practices that place us in proximity to God will make His voice recognizable, and take us a step closer in God's direction.

More on the Path Itself in Part 2.