<pre>In May of 2008 I was walking the streets of downtown Amsterdam with about ten people from a small church in the heart of the city run by a group of 20-somethings. We were all headed to a pub for some late dinner. As we crossed the bridges and made our way through town I was talking with a guy from Egypt talking about God's will.</pre>
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"How do you know what God's will is?" He asked me.</pre>
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I was feeling blissful walking through the warm summer evening. All of Amsterdam was dark, the canals lit by soft white lamps. The light rushed around us to create an unclouded night. Just before leaving for Amsterdam I had to make a couple of decisions about the direction of my education and career. Both situations had orchestrated themselves right in front of me, so I answered with what I knew.</pre>
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"Well, for me at least, it's through the little things. A conversation, a song, books that I read... They all point to something. It seems to keep coming up."</pre>
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This method has been true in most of my life. Someone accidentally speaks straight into my situation without having any knowledge of what I’m going through, the book I’m reading just happens to be covering the topic I’m agonizing over,  or a sermon is taught on just the right Sunday. When I collect enough of these mini-experiences I usually take it as a sign and keep moving. Joel Rieves describes it on his blog "But Not Yet" as “It’s not even a voice at all, to begin with.  It will start as an idea or an urge that just won’t go away."</pre>
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With another big decision on my horizon, I’ve been wondering how much of these mini-experiences and “messages” are actually divine and how much of them are just my mind. Is this “feeling” a report returned after my brain runs analytics on the decision ahead? Is it just a product of all the little decisions I make towards the things that I love that result in these coincidences? Are all these tiny things orchestrated on purpose?</pre>
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Milan Kundera refers to this situation as “the birds of fortuity”. In his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being the main character, Tereza, mistakenly takes a set of chance happenings as a sign and gets herself into something that originally had no significance whatsoever outside of her favorite Beethoven song playing on the radio.</pre>
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"How was it possible that at the very moment she was taking an order of cognac to a stranger she found attractive, at that very moment she heard Beethoven? Necessity knows no magic formulae--they are all left to chance. If love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders."</pre>
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Some people speak of God’s will being this very clear voice in their minds. The only time I have ever encountered that personally was after seeing five of my close friends all joining or starting bands and I was feeling left out. I wanted to play music as well. That night I went into the bathroom to wash my hands before dinner, and as I raised my eyes up from the sink to look at my own face in the mirror I heard: “You don’t need music. I gave you your art.”</pre>
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That was it. No long drawn out answer, no waterfall voices, and no “laying it on my heart” for weeks on end. All it took was nine simple words.</pre>
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How do you personally decipher “God’s will”? Do coincidences that seem to fall into place guide you along? Do you wait to hear a voice? Do you go with your gut or intuition? Do you pray every night and wait for your heart to be pregnant with a burden towards one side or the other? Once you get past the self-doubt (“Am I making this up?”), how do you navigate this kind of stuff?
On one hand I’d really love to believe that God is out there someplace in space just pulling all the tiny individual strings to make me hear the right words in conversation to push me onward. On the other hand, I kind of like the idea that while He is present, He also might not be running each and every minute thing that happens and that there is a natural order to the world that maintains itself. Maybe it’s divine, or maybe it’s just Beethoven playing at the right moment. I’m not sure I know just yet.</pre>