by Gerald May

Driving into the mountains for my first time of real solitude, I prayed simply to be available for whatever God wanted. I had no idea how to let God guide me, but as soon as I arrived I began to see how different my self-contrived agendas, impulses and habits are from real willingness to be moved by God's Spirit. The difference is like night and day, but I cannot describe it in words. I encourage you to explore it yourself. Pray for it, and give yourself the opportunity to be taught what it's like to really let God lead. If you can get a day alone somewhere, sometime, explore what it means to have no agenda, no destination, no object or project in mind, no intention apart from a simple desire to be available for God's guidance.

In order to let God lead, you have to be relatively free from the things that normally determine your thoughts and actions. I find it best to be outdoors, away from the habits of household and civilization. Familiar surroundings always seem to demand certain activities from me. I sit a certain way in a chair, act a certain way in a room, think along particular lines in a particular place. Outdoors, especially in a fairly wild place, I'm much fresher, more immediately available for whatever inspiration might come.

Solitude is virtually essential for me. When I'm near other people I find myself habitually adjusting myself to them, concerned about their needs and expectations, or at least wondering what they're thinking. The simple possibility of other people, even strangers, seeing me makes me self-consciousness enough to censor my behavior.

You may be less restrained than I, but we all have our versions of self-control. The important thing is to find a setting that is as free of social and habitual restrictions as possible, a situation where you can be any way and do anything that strikes you, where you can be outrageous and wild or dull and vegetative and it doesn't matter. No one is going to suffer from your actions or think badly of you if you look foolish. Then you can say to God in your heart, "I really want to be yours for a while. Guide me, lead me. I'm truly willing." Willingness-in-action is born in freedom from restraint.

But then you also encounter your own internal restraints: your expectations, your private mental habits, the controls that arise from your ego. If you are like me, your mind is used to leading and does not relinquish the role easily. Even in wanting to be radically available for God, my mind still has ideas as to how this should happen and what it should look like. Most often I feel the particular discomfort of having no identified objective or occupation, no purpose, reason, goal or destination to give me a sense of who I am and what I'm up to. The mind needs to put such concerns in God's hands, and it may not be able to do so right away.

It's a little like practiced spontaneity, a contradiction in terms. I'm standing in a field and I want God to lead me. Immediately my mind comes up with ideas. "If God were guiding me, I imagine I'd walk over there and look at those trees," or "I think God would want me to sit still here and become very quiet." Or perhaps I just find something sort of holy to think about. At such times I need to pray for mercy, for God's grace to ease my habits of directing everything, to soften my demands upon myself, to "gentle" my needs to come up with something worthwhile to be doing, to replace my sense of responsibility with a spirit of simple responsiveness.

There is a huge difference, I have found, between acting as if God were leading--which is what I do when my ego tries to decide and implement what God wants--and really letting God lead, which happens when my ego stops filtering and controlling and begins simply to see and appreciate.

Being alone and free also relieves us from confusing self-questioning about discernment: Is this really God's leading, or is it just an impulse? Am I responding to the Spirit or just following a whim? I have found nothing more disruptive to my availability to God than my own arrogant attempts to figure out God's will. Perhaps we have to go through such gyrations in making important life decisions, but in this kind of setting, where we are free for a while to do anything or nothing, there is no great risk and no one but God and us to see what happens.

For the first time last Spring, we gave people an option to spend a day alone in nature at Shalem's Spiritual Life of Spiritual Leaders Retreat/Conference. My basic suggestion to them was "Let yourself be led." People's responses to the experience were profound. Some said they had never before been able to risk such abandon. Many described the clear dichotomy, and sometimes the struggle, between personal agendas and inspirations that were "given." Commonly, people found it difficult even to begin walking without having a specific destination in mind, some place to be going. Others would see a certain spot and think, "I'll go sit down there," only to feel themselves led on to another place that they would not have chosen themselves.

One man picked out a beautiful grassy area under a spreading tree but was almost pulled another quarter of a mile into the middle of a dump, where he had one of the most powerful experiences of prayer in his life. A chic, impeccably dressed woman wound up sitting in a mud puddle with a congregation of butterflies. A man who characterized himself as always having to see what is over the next hill found himself led to sit down half way up a hill. He struggled with himself and with God, finally saying, "God, I'm sorry, but I just gotta run up and see what's over the hill; then I'll come right back and sit down here."

Such experiences may sound whimsical, but if I were asked what one thing has been most valuable in my time alone in the wilderness, it would be this exploration of letting God lead. It has given me courage and a deep confidence in God's goodness and presence. The divine Spirit now seems so intimate, so immediately available and willing to guide that I have trouble thinking of praying to or discerning the will of a God "out there" somewhere. The holy other-ness of God remains, but it's like the promise of Deuteronomy 30: "The Word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart."