Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.Malcolm Gladwell
Once we discover our yeses—where passion
meets mission—we then must test them to see if they work. (This is what Dave Evans and Bill Burnett call " trialing" in Designing Your Life.)
But first, let’s take a look at the
process of making decisions.
One of my mentors, the late psychologist
and Princeton Seminary professor, James Loder, represents the type of thinker
whose interests spanned Jean Piaget to John Calvin, Niels Bohr to Søren
Kierkegaard. He was both one of the most brilliant men I’ve met with flights of
intellection that would simply stun and who would also shed tears as he spoke
about his and others’ “transforming moments” with the Spirit, times when lives were
forever altered in God’s direction.
Jim Loder co-wrote a book with physicist
Jim Neidhardt on the integration of theology and science, The Knight’s Move: The Relational Logic of theSpirit in Theology and Science, where
they describe a five-step process of discovery or discernment.
1.
Incoherence (even
conflict, where things don’t quite add up—and we’re searching)
2.
Search for
resolution (where we’re looking around trying to figure out how to solve the
incoherence)
3.
Construction
of new meaning (when the resolution begins)
4.
Release of
energy with the discovery of the resolution (We can think here of Archimedes
running naked from the Greek bath house shouting “eureka”—which means “I found
it”—because he had discovered the theory of the displacement of water.)
5.
Verification
(I’ll return to that in a moment.)
In Loder’s understanding of these “transforming moments,” we interpret or verify our insight in this fifth step, particularly integrating our current resolution with the past and projecting its implications into the future.
I’d like to reflect on these five steps of
discovery or discernment.
First of all, conflict or incoherence can
be good. Sometimes we notice—and it can hurt when we observe this fact—that
there’s a conflict between what we
believe and our life in God’s calling, or we want to refine it. Loder helped me
to see conflict as a necessary part of human development, as the fuel that
moves us forward to greater growth. More specifically, we find our yeses
because of this incoherence.
Second, I believe our intuition or
imagination is powerful. Our intuition often grasps the right answer before we
have the specific steps to prove it. But our intuition is inexact. And that’s
why testing is key.
Loder and Neidhardt analyze Albert
Einstein’s great intuitive leaps that lead him toward his theories of special
and general relativity, theories that define physics almost a hundred years
after Einstein’s discoveries. They describe Einstein’s use of imagination as “a
jump of imaginative insight: a bold leap, an informed, speculative attempt to
understand, a ‘groping’ constructive attempt to understand." Einstein talked about how his intuition guided the process and provoked him to
ask more questions.
When we are searching and testing, we sometimes
find that great imaginative insight, that “bisociation”—where we bring two
ideas that seemed incompatible together—and we work to interpret our lives
accordingly.
Third, discovering almost always includes
continuity with the past. New insights have a connection with our past. They
create a narrative that makes sense. It’s the story God is writing in our
lives. If it doesn’t have continuity, then it’s not a real solution. If we’ve
heard God direct us in the past, the future will make sense with what has gone
before. Each chapter builds on the chapter beforehand. It’s a new chapter, but
the story has continuity.
Finally, verification or testing is essential. And this is the
key concept for this section of my book. As Loder writes of science, “many
beautiful physical theories are simply wrong. The steady-state theory of the
universe was indeed aesthetically very pleasing to the human mind but it could
not account for such key astronomical observations as the background
(black-body) radiation." We have to test our great insights and see how they work. Big bang cosmology
(which is implied in Einstein’s theory of relativity) could account for cosmic
background radiation as the echo of the initial creation of our universe. Thus it
makes better sense.
So now it’s up to you to test your
specific yeses. And this is partially how I understand Paul’s words to “work
out your own salvation” (Philippians 3:11).
(By the way, it’s clear that this is not working
for our salvation because the passage continues with “God is at work among
you.”) “Working out” our salvation means that we work out the implications of your salvation. We’ve
already declared our big Yes to God and now we work out what that means for us
particularly. How does a yes affect the twenty-four a day life as it’s really
lived?