Indecision, Asset or Liability?

For a good part of my life, I’ve been a decisive person, choosing in haste and regretting at leisure. As I’ve experienced the consequences of those choices, indecision has become almost normal.

If you put me in a quilt store with 4,000 bolts of fabric, and I have no fabric goal, I will walk out with small cuts of discounted fabric, and a spool of thread.

Aldi’s owns me. Less choices, less confusion, less prices. I can get in and out in under an hour, and come home with more food than I’d find anywhere else. Their ‘aisle of shame’ is my kryptonite.

Don’t get me started on streaming TV! I can sit for ages trying to decide what program to watch. I make lists for the various platforms, discard them and start again. Just when I think I’ve settled on something, a new show arrives and the debate begins again.

Ted Lasso take 25, here I come!

I long for the toddler years when life was simply about eating, play, bath time and sleeping. When a nap could fix everything.

Options breed indecisiveness, leading to stress, anxiety and often insecurity. My descent into indecisive madness is littered with the rejected choices of my dithering. I could fill books with the unchosen options I’ve discarded on the way to a final choice. Currently, we’re living with the option of where to plant ourselves in the future. Having the freedom to choose can leave us deeply insecure, even fearful, about the right place to live.

So how have we navigated this issue?

In our journeys we’ve kept in mind that Michigan, specifically Detroit, will be our eventual home. It’s the reason we spent so much time here this the summer. We were divinely led to a church in Detroit that has become a home church for us. Leaving what we had in Chicago, meant that we’d need a place with the kind of community we had there. It took us a long time to find it in Chicago and we weren’t going to give it up easily.

Enter Hope Community Church

For 2 summers we’ve spent time here. We’ve learned, grown to know and be known, and given from our resources to this place. It’s a humble, loving, Biblical and supportive church. People from every walk of life and background attend. Stories abound of lives changed by a loving and powerful God. Multi cultural and multi generational are the norm. And while the adult numbers are small, children are abundant.

This decision has come about with far more input, prayer, (and a couple of ‘fleeces’) than any of the above. It’s a decision that meant additional confirmation from above. The stakes are higher, with more eternal consequence.

But why Detroit you ask?

There is need and we have always been drawn to need. It’s been through a kind of apocalyptic breakdown, with the loss of the auto industry. Blocks of abandoned houses, and miles of empty lots where they’ve been demolished, to discourage use. Our daughter said it looked like an urban wilderness.

She wasn’t wrong.

There is wisdom in easing into this place. It’s both exciting and daunting. Bruce’s statement that ‘there is no retirement in the Kingdom’, motivates us as we anticipate the future. We know there are people who need Jesus’ love and his transformative power, and we pray we can help demonstrate it. It wasn’t a city that was ever on our radar. Until we expected a grandchild an hour away, we’d never considered it.

But now, it’s beginning to call us…

In order to find where we fit here, we spent time exploring last week.

The art museum.

Various neighborhoods.

People have said for decades that “It’s coming back!” And in some ways it’s true. I spoke with a long time resident who said she sees it reviving all the time. But it’s a city that still has a long way to go. It’s hard to describe a place that once housed 2 million people and now houses less than 650,000.

The abandonment is stunning.

But the other side of abandonment, is potential. And we find it in many neighborhoods where people are seeing the possibilities for abundant living. Blight turned into urban farms (with goats!). Opportunities for affordable rehabilitation. Historic preservation. New build communities with new housing technology. And small businesses beginning to take over the evacuated, boarded up buildings.

Someday, it may become an affordable, mid-size city option in America.

So as we prepare to leave Michigan this summer, for more travel to new places and adventures, we leave with a sense of belonging, anticipation and purpose. We’re looking forward to next summer when we’ll spend all our time near Hope Church, helping the neighborhood grow and revive.

This decision, unlike groceries or streaming TV, requires us to surrender our own lists and reasoning, to a loving God who knows how we need to spend the last decades of our lives.

I’m counting it as an asset.