Had a few conversations with a few NCCers this week about discerning the will of God and I thought I’d share one of my paradigms.

I think there are two linchpins: you have to be called to and released from. What I mean by that is this. You need to feel called to whatever it is that you want to do. And because that often requires giving something else up, I think you need to feel released from whatever it is that you’re doing.

The challenge is this: very rarely do those two things coincide. So most of live in the tension between those two things. We experience lots of angst when we feel released from what we’re doing but we don’t know what we’re called to do next. And we feel a different type of angst when we feel called to something but we don’t feel released from whatever we’re doing right now.

I think I got that paradigm from Peter Marshall, the former Senate Chaplain in the late 1940′s. When the elders at the historic New York Avenue Presbyterian asked him to be their pastor he felt called, but he didn’t feel released from the church he was at so Peter Marshall said no to the original offer. It was about a year later that the opportunity circled back and he said yes because he felt released.

You’ve got to feel called to and released from.