A prayer for making a decision
The prayer
Lord, I have to choose, and none of the options comes with a guarantee.
Before anything else, clean out my motives. Half of what I am calling doubt is fear, or vanity, or hurry in a better coat.
I am not asking for a sign. If one comes, I will take it — but I am not going to sit still waiting for a sign so that I never have to decide.
Send me the counsel of sensible people, nerve enough to choose on what I know today, and peace enough to live with what I choose.
Amen.
In short
This is a prayer for when a choice has to be made, written for this site and signed. It does not ask for a sign from heaven: it asks for clean motives, counsel from sensible people, and the nerve to decide on the information that exists today. Waiting for a sign is often a polite way of not deciding.
- Written by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 5 min read
When to pray it
When the choice is already on the table and the clock is running — before accepting the offer, before giving the answer, before signing.
Start with the sign, because it is the most common request and the most obstructive. Signs do occur in the Bible, and when they do they are rare, unmistakable and almost always unrequested — nobody in Acts asks for one. Waiting for a sign, in practice, is usually something else: a way of transferring responsibility for the choice and of not having to own what follows. While the sign fails to arrive the deadline keeps moving, and not deciding is also a decision, taken by default.
The first request in the prayer is the least comfortable: cleaning out the motives. A good deal of what we call doubt is not a shortage of information but fear of disappointing somebody, an appetite for looking impressive, or an urge to end the discomfort. Three questions help sort it. What would you tell a friend in the same position? Which of the options are you avoiding mentioning to people who know you well? And if fear were taken out of the calculation, would the answer be obvious? Writing the two options side by side, with what each gains and costs, is entirely unglamorous and remains the exercise that works best.
The last request is for peace to live with the choice, and it is there because a good decision is not the same thing as a decision that turned out well. At the moment of choosing the information is always incomplete, and judging a past decision by an outcome that only appeared afterwards is unfair to the person you were that day. And the Acts 15 formula is worth holding on to: that “and to us” came after the argument, not instead of it.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared Written for Faith Flame in 2026
There is a way of talking about the will of God that freezes good people for months: treating it as a hidden answer you have to guess, on pain of getting your life wrong. Anyone who believes that starts hunting for signs in coincidences, in a Bible opened at random, in a dream — and postpones the decision, because deciding without certainty becomes disobedience. This prayer was written against that mechanism.
Scripture almost never works that way. Proverbs asks for trust and for counsel; James 4 mocks the trader who speaks of next year with certainty, yet does not forbid planning — it corrects the certainty, not the spreadsheet; and the council in Acts 15 decides after a long argument and records the outcome with the formula “it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us”. Deliberation and discernment appear side by side rather than in opposition.
This one is ours, written for this site, and signed. It avoids promising the sign, avoids promising that the choice will turn out to be the right one, and avoids turning a hard decision into a test of spiritual sensitivity. What it asks for is what tends to be genuinely missing: clean motives, counsel from outside, nerve to act on incomplete information, and peace to live alongside the choice once it is made.
Little-known details
The last decision drawn by lot in the New Testament happens before Pentecost
The most famous guidance Paul received arrived as a closed door
What the passages say
5Have confidence in the Lord with all your heart, and do not depend upon your own prudence.
6In all your ways, consider him, and he himself will direct your steps.
The most quoted passage about decisions and the most misread. It does not promise that the answer will be disclosed before the choice: the closing verb is about the direction of the steps over a course, which is a promise about a trajectory rather than about next Tuesday.
13But who are you to judge your neighbor? Consider this, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into that city, and certainly we will spend a year there, and we will do business, and we will make our profit,”
14consider that you do not know what will be tomorrow.
15For what is your life? It is a mist that appears for a brief time, and afterwards will vanish away. So what you ought to say is: “If the Lord wills,” or, “If we live,” we will do this or that.
The target here is the certainty, not the planning. The passage quotes somebody who already knows the city, the year and the profit — and the correction offered is not to stop planning, it is to add a clause of humility to the plan.
28For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose no further burden upon you, other than these necessary things:
The most interesting sentence in the New Testament about how a community decides, and what makes it interesting is the “and to us”. It comes at the end of a whole chapter of debate, with opposing positions argued openly before any consensus.
6Then, while crossing through Phrygia and the region of Galatia, they were prevented by the Holy Spirit from speaking the Word in Asia.
7But when they had arrived in Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not permit them.
8Then, when they had crossed through Mysia, they descended to Troas.
9And a vision in the night was revealed to Paul of a certain man of Macedonia, standing and pleading with him, and saying: “Cross into Macedonia and help us!”
10Then, after he saw the vision, immediately we sought to set out for Macedonia, having been assured that God had called us to evangelize to them.
A run of closed doors before an open one, all of them found in motion. Notice that the text records no explanation given to Paul about why Asia was ruled out — it simply narrates what happened as he kept walking.