Decisions, decisions

Due to the recommendation of a friend, I recently began reading a book titled "Decision Making and the will of God." This book presents two different ideas of God's will. One is the traditional method, that teaches that God has a specific individual will for every believer, that encompasses every decision they will ever make. The other is the wisdom method, which says that God has two wills, a sovereign will and a moral will. Further, it says that God's sovereign will is secret, so we will never know what it is, but the moral will is completely revealed to us through the Bible. I like this because it takes the stress out of which decisions to make. As long as I am within God's moral will, I can make whatever decision I want to.

This also means that, in most cases, there is no direct revelation from God, concerning choices that do not conflict with His moral will (obviously, there are certain times where God does supernaturally intervene and tell someone to do one thing or another). This being the case (and the book provides a really sound argument for why a specific will for every believer is not actually biblical) then what I took as "God's voice" four years ago, telling me to go to Biola, wasn't God, it was me. That is very hard for me to swallow.

See, as long as I could believe that God had told me to change schools, I could justify the amount of money spent, that I didn't have. I took the voice in my head, that was seemingly out of the blue, and offering an idea completely contrary to what I had previously ever considered, as God telling me to do it. Then, I took the manner of my acceptance into Torrey as confirmation of that.

I learned later that Dr. Reynolds apparently has a certain amount of veto power over decisions made about acceptance, and that I was one of  the ones whose rejection got overridden. That left me with the random voice, and the fact that to have a rejection simply reversed still is a really rare occurrence. Now, however, I wonder if I read it that way because I wanted to read it that way. The several times that I prayed about staying or transferring somewhere else, I always felt like that voice in my head was God telling me to stay. The responses seemed to line up with what I knew of Him from scripture, so I listened, and I stayed.

Now, four years later, and 90,000 in debt, God has not miraculously provided a way for me to pay that debt back. I haven't even been able to land a decent job that would take care of that the normal way. I have prayed for God to help me get out of the hole I'm in, but so far, I haven't really gotten much direction. So, I keep applying, and keep praying. And maybe God will intervene and help me get things paid off, because while I appreciate the education I have, when education is all you've got, there aren't a whole lot of options available.