Honey or Buffalo?
The other night I was ordering takeaways with my housemate and couldn't decide between ordering the Honey Chicken burger or the Buffalo Burger. I’m a proper foodie so deciding between the two was properly painful.
Within a moment my phone was out and I searched for an “easy decision maker”, labelling each burger A and B and requesting the decision be made for me.
It told me Honey Chicken and I ordered Buffalo.
Bigger decisions
Now, other decisions in life aren’t as easily decided by basic AI functionality. Rather, we are often faced with ones of much more significance.
When was the last time you were faced with a big decision and how do you typically approach them?
Although I do hope prayer is part of it, this isn’t a trick question where it’s the only right answer, because it may not be, or it may just come at different points along your stream of thought.
What’s the alternative?
Personally, I don’t pull out my phone but I often ask myself the question: What’s the alternative?
I find this a helpful question to prompt my mind to determine what alternative, yet realistic realities I could find myself in.
The key word here is realistic, and once I’ve scanned through my options it more often than not helps me lean into the one I find myself in now.
Alternative realities
Say you’re midway through a degree or a particular phase of your job. You may be flourishing or frustrated - enjoying progress or craving end.
A decision on what to do for the former may come easily: keep doing what you’re doing. A decision for the latter may be more challenging.
You could drop out. Quit. What next? You could change part of your process? Implement a new strategy? Form a new habit?
What next?
Question your options. Scan your alternative, but realistic realities. Perhaps you find your reality is not so bad or perhaps you recognise a way to reach one better.
Bigger decisions
Perhaps, the big decision has nothing to do with work or study. Perhaps it’s to do with your kids, your parents, your friends, or yourself. Or, absolutely anything else.
Either way, question what you can do and where that can lead based on the actions or decisions within your control.
However, as obvious as it is human: not everything is in our control.
Navigating big decisions can be extremely difficult when we live in a world that not only amplifies angst but encourages it. A place of constant exposure to the mixing of emotions, manufacturing of doubts and facilitation of uncertainty for what we’re truly after and how to get it.
Lead to lean
This is why it is important that once we figure out the lead, we focus on the lean.
Leaning into the fact that the mixture of angst, doubts, uncertainty and other feelings will exist, it is human and will naturally be part of each day of our lives.
And we can lean into that.
Not necessarily into the emotions, but the reality that this will always exist.
Leaning away from resistance
Leaning in is less resisting and less resistance frees up energy that was before used to fight our reality and can now be used to embrace it. That’s what leaning in is.
Like setting your criteria for a peaceful life as one with an empty to-do list whilst existing in the reality that it will remain forever unending - leaning into this true reality brings you closer to that peaceful life.
Of course, it won’t always be the solution, but it provides perspective and makes your circumstances and decisions more manageable.
Leaning into your reality makes things easier, not easy - like knowing the dog two houses down could gnaw your head off yet its snarl still skips your heart a beat each time you walk by.
Daily leaning
Leaning in goes beyond the initial decision. It is a daily choice that can be hard, but that final destination is so great - made with good intentions and God wants us to get there.
God has the ideal alternate reality He wants us to reach.
The worldly world may facilitate our human realities, but it doesn’t facilitate God. God is beyond it yet His plan leads us through it.
Along His path.
A path paved through a human world where bad things happen along the way, but a path perfectly imperfect, and, when leant into, makes the moments of angst, doubts and uncertainty along the journey exactly what it is.
Lean in to
And to be leant into requires us to lean in to.
So lean in.
Whether you drop out or quit your job. Whether you’re facing decisions to do with your family, friends, yourself or anything else - don’t resist your circumstances or fight between realities. Lean in.
Lean into where you are now and where you can lead.
Harrison is a 24-year old, raised in a non-Christian family and came to faith at 18. Having worked as a Marketing & Communications Assistant for two years after getting his Bachelor of Communications in 2019, He has swapped his home of New Zealand for Europe after a few months working at a summer Christian camp in Canada. He has a passionate personality which is illustrated in many facets of his life, from writing, to sports, food, friends, family and God. Harrison enjoys exploring and grasping different parts of life and discussing them with others. Chat with Harrison further at: harrisonbellve@gmail.com