Total Abandonment: Waiting, Decisions, and God’s Will, Oh My!

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.”
Proverbs 3:5-6

For this next little tidbit from Freely Given, I would like to share the lesson of total abandonment that God has brought to us repeatedly over the last few months. Not only has it brought Nic and I incredible peace, but it has truly transformed our understanding of the Lord’s will for our lives.

Impatient Waiting and Paralyzing Decisions

As you have probably already heard, since finishing residency (the end of my medical training) we have entered the next stage of moving toward the mission field … which primarily includes waiting until our school loans are either paid off or significantly reduced and waiting for the right door to open overseas. Waiting. Waiting. And waiting. To put it mildly, this has proved to be difficult for me. I am SO impatient! I made the rookie mistake of having really high expectations and assuming it would work out quickly. In my mind, my training was already such a lengthy process toward our end goal, that I assumed this next step would be a cinch. Then another challenge arose that has been almost as difficult for me as the waiting … the decision making process. Oh how I hate making decisions. I see the good in a multitude of options and fret over making the wrong choice. I am a classic over-thinker. I may have been found on occasion to hold up the ordering process at a restaurant because I simply can’t choose the perfect meal—something I don’t usually make at home, something that I can only get at that location, something I haven’t recently had. Yes, it’s really annoying. Have you seen Chidi in The Good Place? I am only slightly less agonized over decision making than his character.

Staying Until His Will Moves Us

Our recent decisions revolve around how and where we should live out this time while we await eventually moving overseas. Could my work be more ministry-oriented? How do salary and loan repayment balance with cost of living and our ability to save toward our goals? What about our children’s schooling? What about extended family? These thoughts start to swirl in my head pretty constantly and have begun to cause fairly significant anxiety. Over time, the stress of waiting and the anxiety provoked by analyzing what feels like every option under the sun, has begun to steal my joy and peace. Mercifully, however, the Lord has been bringing me exactly the lesson I need in the midst of that stress and anxiety. Oh, I wish He’d make it easy and just give me all the answers I want right now (and I doubt I’m alone in that desire, so perhaps you can relate to my struggle.) Instead, over the last few months the Lord has graciously been reminding me, over and over, that I can, without reservation or fear, completely trust Him. Also, I can be secure in the fact that I am right where He wills me to be in this moment, despite the fact that I feel like I would sort-of rather be in Cambodia. (I can’t even start to articulate this better than those I learned it from, so I will share some passages below that flesh this out a little better.)

In a nutshell, I wish I was writing to tell the world we are moving to Cambodia next week and a mobile medical unit will be up and running by the end of the year. Instead, for now we are being called to trust in God’s timing and be totally abandoned to His perfect will.

He Leadeth Me
By Fr. Walter Ciszek
(This book was written by a priest who spent 5 years in solitary confinement followed by 15 years in a Russian work camp. The truths he was able to internalize about God’s will in the most extreme of circumstances is absolutely remarkable.)

Our dilemma at Teplaya-Gora [the Russian work camp] came from our frustration at not being able to do what we thought the will of God ought to be in this situation, at our inability to work as we thought God would surely want us to work, instead of accepting the situation itself as his will. It is a mistake easily made by every man, saint or scholar, church leader or day laborer. Ultimately, we come to expect God to accept our understanding of what his will ought to be and to help us fulfill that, instead of learning to see and accept his will in the real situations in which he places us daily. To predict what God’s will is going to be, to rationalize about what his will must be, is at once a work of human folly and yet the subtlest of all temptations. The plain and simple truth is that his will is what he actually wills to send us each day, in the way of circumstances, places, people, and problems. The trick is to learn to see that—not just in theory, or not just occasionally in a flash of insight granted by God’s grace, but every day. Each of us has no need to wonder about what God’s will must be for us; his will for us is clearly revealed in every situation of every day, if only we could learn to view all things as he sees them and sends them to us.

I Believe in Love: A Personal Retreat Based on the Teachings of St. Therese of Lisieux
By Fr. Jean C. J. d’Elbee

(This book has taught me so much about the complete trust and confidence we can place in Our Lord, and it emphasizes that that trust and confidence leads us to total abandonment to His will.)

“Practically speaking, of what does abandonment consist? It consists of seeing the will of God in all that creatures and events present to you. Remember that each event in your life brings you Jesus’ will. We see only the links in the chain one by one, without seeing how they are interconnected. The day Jesus allows you to catch a glimpse of the whole golden chain, the marvelous succession of events, you will thank Him and bless Him. And what is incomparably more beautiful is to thank Him and bless Him before having seen—breaking through misleading appearances by these words alone: “I do not see, but I am sure of You. I believe because I know who You are; I know whom I have believed.” (2 Timothy 1:12) It is in abandonment that our great desires find their perfect fulfillment.“

I’ll leave you with one final thought from Fr. Cisek:

“His will for us was the twenty-four hours of each day: the people, the places, the circumstances he set before us in that time. Those were the things God knew were important to him and to us at that moment, and those were the things upon which he wanted us to act, not out of any abstract principle or out of any subjective desire to “do the will of God.” No, these things, the twenty-four hours of this day, were his will; we had to learn to recognize his will in the reality of the situation and to act accordingly. We had to learn to look at our daily lives, at everything that crossed our path each day, with the eyes of God; learn to see his estimate of things, places, and above all people, recognize that he had a goal and a purpose in bringing us into contact with these things and these people, and strive always to do that will—his will—every hour of every day.”