The Playpen In The Other Room

Decision fatigue doesn’t come up much in church. We talk a great deal about finding God’s will for our lives, and almost as much about “letting go and letting God,” but I have never once heard a sermon on the plain exhaustion of having to choose when nobody or will tell you which way to go.

I learned it during my youth pastor years.

I led youth ministries at some sizable churches back then, and I loved a great deal of it. The kids, the late nights, the retreats where somebody always got sick on the bus. What I did not love was the paycheck, which was unreliable when it came and insufficient when it did. So I patched the gaps the way most people in ministry do: I babysat. I clerked at a bookstore (which surprises no one who knows me now; I suspect I’d have paid them to let me stand near the shelves). I did whatever filled the month.

And at some point in all of that I started praying, earnestly, about what to do with my life. I didn’t think I’d misheard a calling. Ministry wasn’t wrong for me. But ministry as a job, as the thing that would pay my rent for the next 30+ years, wasn’t what I wanted long term, and I felt guilty for wanting anything else. In the circles I came up in, personal preference about your vocation was treated as faintly suspect, as if a desire was evidence of the flesh simply by being a desire.

So I went back to school, and the options flattened me.

I barely knew who I was. I certainly didn’t know what a regular day looked like in any of the careers on offer. I sat with course catalogs and degree plans and prayed for direction, and what I got back was a long, even silence.

I felt abandoned.

I knew, even then, that freedom isn’t the same as being left. I’d been taught that. But a plain command, go here, do this, would have made me feel held. Known. Like somebody was looking at my particular life and had an opinion about it.

That gap is still with me. Lately my prayers have met a lot of silence, and I’ve noticed something about myself I’m not proud of: I think I’d prefer a no. A firm, clear, unwelcome no would at least tell me He’s nearby and paying attention. Sometimes I feel like a toddler in a playpen. Safe, fed, protected on every side, and the grown-ups are in the other room doing something else for a while.

I’ve written before about the shape of God’s permissive will.

the latitude He gives us inside the boundary of His character, and I still hold everything I said there. But I left something out, maybe because I didn’t want to look at it at the time. Latitude is lonely. Room to move is also room in which nobody is standing next to you.

“How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day?” (Psalm 13:1-2). 4 times in 2 verses: how long. And look at the third complaint in particular, about taking counsel in his own soul. David is describing decision fatigue. He’s having to work things out by himself because the counsel he wants isn’t coming, and he names that as a grief.

The prophet Habakkuk did something with the silence

He opens his book with a complaint very close to David’s: “O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear?” (Habakkuk 1:2). And then, in chapter two, he doesn’t stop asking and he doesn’t keep shouting. He changes his posture. “I will take my stand at my watchpost and station myself on the tower, and look out to see what he will say to me” (2:1).

A watchman on a wall isn’t idle. He’s at his post, alert, scanning the horizon for something he expects will come even though it hasn’t yet. And the answer, when it comes, contains this: “If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay” (2:3). God’s own word to the waiting prophet admits that it will seem slow. He doesn’t argue with Habakkuk’s sense of time. He just tells him to keep watching.

That was about 400 years before the longest silence in Israel’s history. Between Malachi and John the Baptist there was no recognized prophetic voice at all, generation after generation of people praying into what must have felt like an empty room. And then the Word didn’t merely speak. He became flesh and moved in (John 1:14). I don’t want to oversimplify though, because the people who lived and died during those four centuries never heard the answer. But the silence did end, and it ended in a way nobody waiting had imagined.

Some of my longing for clear commands isn’t about nearness at all. It’s about responsibility.

If God tells me to become a pharmacist, and pharmacy turns out to be grueling (which it sometimes is), then the outcome isn’t mine. I was only obeying. A command lets me off the hook in a way that freedom never will. When I choose, I own the choice, including the parts that go badly.

I’m not sure that’s a desire for intimacy. I think some of it is a desire for an alibi.

And yet I can’t dismiss the asking entirely, because God doesn’t. Gideon lays out a fleece and asks for dew on the wool and dry ground around it, and gets it. Then, embarrassed, he asks for the reverse, “let me speak just once more,” and gets that too (Judges 6:36-40). There’s no rebuke in the passage. God accommodates a frightened man’s need for reassurance, twice. So the request itself isn’t sinful. It’s just that God doesn’t seem obligated to grant it every time, and I’ve had to make my peace with that more slowly than I’d like.

What unsettles me most is a pair of passages that suggest freedom is the closer arrangement, and not the more distant one.

In Galatians, Paul describes an heir who, while he is still a child, “is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything, but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father” (4:1-2). The child gets instructions. The child is managed. Then the date arrives and he’s treated as a son, which means, among other things, that he’s expected to make decisions about an estate that is now his.

Christ makes a similar move the night before the cross. “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15). A servant gets orders without explanation. A friend is let in on the purpose and trusted to act inside it.

Which means the thing I’ve been asking for, a direct command for every fork in the road, may be the relationship of a servant or of a child still under guardians.

And the thing I’ve been grieving, the latitude, the having to choose, may be what friendship with God looks like from the inside.

I’ll admit it doesn’t feel like friendship. It feels like the other room. But I think my feelings are measuring proximity by the volume of instruction, and the Bible doesn’t seem to measure it that way.

There’s a small detail in Genesis I come back to:

Before there’s any sin, any exile, any law, God forms the animals and brings them to the man “to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name” (Genesis 2:19). The Hebrew is simple, lir’ot, to see. God steps back and watches to see what Adam will do with the freedom he’s been given, and then He lets Adam’s choices stand.

That isn’t absence, it’s attention of a particular sort. It’s a Creator interested enough in His creature’s judgment to wait for it instead of supplying it.

Ecclesiastes says something along the same line, from a much more tired voice. “He who observes the wind will not sow, and he who regards the clouds will not reap… In the morning sow your seed, and at evening withhold not your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good” (11:4, 6). I love that last clause. Whether both alike will be good. The Preacher allows for the possibility that the two options I’ve been agonizing over might both have been fine. Maybe my anxiety about picking the wrong career assumed there was only one acceptable answer, and the silence was partly God declining to pretend there was.

When Colin was very small, he had a playpen.

I spent plenty of time in the kitchen while he was in it. I remember that I could tell, from the other room, the difference between a contented quiet and a quiet that meant he’d found something he shouldn’t have. I was listening the whole time. I was never in the kitchen instead of watching him. Being out of sight was simply how I got dinner made, and I’d have been across the floor in two seconds if the sound had changed.

He didn’t know that, of course. From inside the playpen, I was just gone.

I don’t say that to wave away what I feel. The silence is still silence, and I still pray into it, and some nights I still wish for a no just to hear the voice. But I’ve been on the other side of the wall, and I know what it is to be listening when the child thinks you aren’t.

I’m at my watchpost, more or less. I’m still sowing seed without knowing which row will come up. And I’m trying to remember, on the quieter days, that the One in the other room has better hearing than I ever did.