Sunday Selection: Inspired Decisions

I wanted to share some of the thoughts we had as a group during Elder’s Quorum (Priesthood Meeting) at Church today. President Ladd taught the lesson, and it was on inspired decisions. He presented six steps to coming up with an inspired decision:

Six Steps to Coming Up With an Inspired Decision:

1. Identify the Problem
• We all make decisions everyday, sometimes trivial, sometimes life-changing. Sometimes they are spiritual, but sometimes they are more of a temporal nature. Examples of temporal decisions may be to find out which job to accept, whether to accept a job wherein you need to relocate, a question about your garden or your “fields” (Alma 37:37).

2. Pray About It
• I thought this was interesting. I would think prayer would be the last part of the process. Like it says in Doctrine & Covenants—study it out in your mind and in your heart, and THEN pray, and you will feel the answer to what you should do. But no, you should first pray as soon as you identify the problem. In this way, you can receive divine help all along the way, and SOMETIMES, the Lord will answer your prayer right then and there, and you can move right along to step 5. I have had this happen several times (mostly in the last year and a half), and each time, I was very surprised to hear the answer WHILE I was still praying—before I even ended the prayer! Each time, I thought, “Are you sure?! You don’t want me to… ponder it more?” So yes, it is well worth it to pray about your decision before you move on to the next steps in the process.

3. Study the Problem
• Ah yes. This goes to that scripture in D&C about the Lord making it known to you AFTER you study it out “in your mind and in your heart.” Study it out, ask friends and others who may inspire you, and just ponder it.

4. Make a Decision
• Since you are receiving divine help along the way, go ahead and make the decision. Be confident! This will be the choice that you bring to the Lord. Several times during this lesson, I thought of the story of the Brother of Jared at the beginning of the book of Ether in the Book of Mormon. I thought of how he had an important decision to make (how to have light in the 16 underwater barges in which he and his people would be traveling for the next year). He received a divine prompt to make a decision HIMSELF and THEN present it to the Lord for approval/confirmation. I thought of the confidence that he had when he brought his choice to the Lord, and the Lord rewarded him for his faith by helping him to know that the decision was a correct one.

5. Pray for Confirmation
• This is when we receive a “Yeah” or a “Neigh.” As you already know, you may not receive the answer you wanted, and it may not come WHEN you want it. That means not always right away, either.

6. Act—Do It!
• Sometimes we’ll think we made the wrong decision based on the results of the choice we made. Sometimes we won’t see that it was a good decision until much later. A lot of times we will ask, “Why?” “Why is this happening to ME?” If the times get tough, we also need to remember those feelings of confirmation that we did receive when we brought it to the Lord in prayer. Remember that decision-making process that was performed. Those six steps were important—don’t go back on your choose simply because it doesn’t feel right at first. Remember—that was an inspired decision!

We have to remember that things DO happen for a reason! We have to be ready for those tough times.

The other interesting thing that I got from this lesson was that we need to do the work ourselves—God will not take away our free agency by making the decision FOR us. This goes back to the story of the Jaredites—the brother of Jared needed to decide what HE wanted the Lord to do to help him. God wasn’t going to just spoon-feed it to him.