I think I made the wrong choice!

Comments

• marina008

  May 2009

  Hello Bent Baba yasoo3
  
  
  I think you should start off with prayer. Nothing is impossible with God. With all due respect I think you breaking the relationship because he didn't want to move to U.S. is not a valid point to break it up for. It seems he's a good person and you dont really see anything bad in him. I think you should pray to God and ask Him to open you eyes and help you realize if this relationship should be maintained as just a friend or even closer. You should also ask your FOC for advice. 
  May God bless you and direct you!
  
  Please pray for me
  
• coolboy1000g

  May 2009

  Ask and it shall be given, knock and it will be opened to you
  
  Like marina008 said, start by praying that god gives you the wisdom and the comfort in the decision that you make. Ask for god's will to be revealed clearly
  A good question that you should ask yourself is what you want to do with your educational life, will you want to continue studying or not; because lets say you get married in Egypt and then realize that you want to further pursue your goals, but then it wont work because your degree is from the US.
  After you make a final decision with god's guidance, then you will be able to decide whether to be with that person as friends or more.
  I think this excerpt from a book called Practical spirituality would be helpful in regarding finding god's will:
  DISCERNING THE WILL OF GOD:
  Sometimes one gets into a situation when he is unable to take a
  decision easily. For example, you get accepted into two universities, one
  in your home town and the other is out of town but is more famous. Or
  you have a job but you get an offer of another job in another city and
  you can’t make up your mind. It is these situations when we sometimes
  ask, “What is the will of God for me?” Knowing the will of God can be
  very difficult, but not if we follow the methods of the fathers.
  But, before we get into this, let us ask ourselves, why is it important
  for me to know the will of God?
  Saint Paul tells us in Romans 12:2, that the will of God is good, and
  acceptable, and perfect. The will of God is perfect, it lacks nothing, it
  is good for me in satisfying my spiritual, physical, psychological and
  emotional needs. God knows the future and therefore he knows what
  will be good for me in the long term.
  My own will, on the other hand, is anything but perfect. I probably
  look for benefit in the short term without considering the long term.
  And even if I wanted to consider the long term I may not be able to,
  since I cannot predict what will happen to me even next week.
  It is for these reasons that a wise person should always seek the will
  of God in whatever he does.
  But, how can I know the will of God? Theophan the Recluse tells us
  that in order for God to reveal His good, acceptable and perfect will to
  me, I have to renounce my self will. That means, I have to prove to God
  that I am really seeking His will.
  Sometimes we ask God to reveal His will to us but deep inside we
  have already made up our minds. Sometimes we seek the will of God,
  as long as it agrees with our own will. If we act in this way then God will
  not reveal His will to us.
  Theophan the Recluse gives us this “parable.” He says, if you have
  a glass full of vinegar, and you want to put honey in that glass, you must
  first throw away the vinegar, wash the glass, put it out in the sun for a
  few hours until the smell of the vinegar disappears, and then put the
  honey in it. The vinegar here is our own will which is selfish, short
  sighted, and unlike the will of God, is not perfect, good or acceptable.
  The honey is the will of God. And, unless we bury our self will, God will
  not reveal His will to us, because we will actually be mocking God by
  asking him to reveal to us His will while our own will is already made
  up.
  How do I do this? There is an exercise for this called neutralization
  of my will. The theory is this. I always have a bias either for or against
  anything I am considering. For example, if I get an offer for a job that
  will give me more money, I may have a bias towards that job, that will
  make me blind to the bad aspects of this job. Or, I may face a situation
  in which I am asked to accept something that I don’t like, and that
  makes me overlook the many good features of that thing. These likes
  and dislikes are usually based on a first impression, that I usually reenforce
  by ignoring the other side of the coin, and the remedy is to do
  the opposite.
  Let us take an example. I have been accepted in a good university in
  my home town, but I have an offer from another university that is far
  from home. The lure of “freedom” makes me ignore the many negative
  aspects of going to study far from home. If you really want to know
  what is the perfect, good and acceptable will of God in this matter, I
  should neutralize my bias, by intentionally identifying and even
  magnifying the negative aspects of that far away university.
  For one, I will be far from my family and friends. I will feel lonely,
  with only strangers to talk to. There is no church near that university,
  but I will have to travel for hours to find a Coptic church. I will lose my Father in confession, to whom I could always come for help, but who
  will be far away from me, and so on.
  Of course these negative aspects are true but you were ignoring
  them because of “freedom” away from home and parental scrutiny. Any
  one who is serious can do this exercise in a few days. The result will be
  that you will find yourself neutral to the two proposals, each one has its
  good and bad aspects.
  The same can be applied to the situation where you get an offer of
  a job that promises thousands of dollars more, but at the expense of
  taking your children away from their schools, their friends and their
  Sunday School, and moving away from your service in the Church and
  from your Father in confession.
  The first step then is to neutralize the bias by seriously identifying
  the negative aspects and giving them as much weight as the positive
  ones. Then and only then, you can go to God to ask Him to reveal His
  good and perfect and acceptable will to you.
  The next step is to go to your Father in confession and ask him to
  pray for you, so that God may reveal His will to you. This act of
  submitting yourself to your Father in confession is an act of humility, a
  very necessary pre-requisite for God revealing His will to you.
  If you feel afraid that God will chose the one option that you do not
  favour, then you have not done your home work the right way, the bias
  is still there. And if you go to your Father in confession asking him to
  pray for you but, subconsciously, you wish that God will choose one
  option over the other, then you have not done your homework well.
  It may well be that God will actually choose the one option you
  favoured before you neutralized your will, as I will show you in the next
  example.
  A young man that I knew in Egypt before coming to Canada, wrote
  me a letter complaining that although his parents and his siblings are all
  in Canada (as immigrants), he has been consistently refused permission
  to immigrate by the Canadian embassy.
  I wrote to him telling him, maybe it is not the will of God that you
  immigrate to Canada. I then explained to him how to seek to know the
  will of God and how to neutralize his own bias in this respect. He
  accepted my advise and started thinking about the benefits of not
  immigrating to Canada He told his wife, if we stay in Egypt, our house will be the place
  where my parents and siblings come when they want to visit Egypt. And,
  since we have good jobs here, we don’t have to start from scratch if we
  go to Canada, writing exams only to be told that we do not have
  “Canadian experience.” We could always visit Canada and enjoy being
  with our family, and thus have the best of both worlds. They both went
  re-enforcing this until they became convinced that staying in Egypt is
  not such a bad idea after all, especially if this is the will of God for
  them.
  In his next letter he wrote me, “The same day we felt free from the
  bias and it didn’t matter anymore for us whether we immigrate or stay
  in Egypt, was the day we received a telephone from the Canadian
  embassy telling us we were approved and have to do the medicals in
  order to receive our visas.
  The beauty about doing this exercise, is that every time you are faced
  with the same situation, you go back to the same routine. It will be very
  easy for you not to think too much about what you ought to do, but
  rather neutralize or “bury’ your will so that the perfect, good and
  acceptable will of God may be revealed to you.
  There are some words of caution that I would like to tell you. Do not
  try to cheat! Sometimes we seek the will of God but when God reveals
  His will to us, we don’t like it. Some people would go to another priest
  hoping that changing the priest may change the will of God!
  The other problem is that we ignore the will of God completely and
  seek our own will, just praying to God to give us what we want. This can
  be disastrous especially in the matter of marriage.
  The late Bishop Poemen of blessed memory once told me a story
  about a young man who always came to the Bishop because of marital
  problems with his wife. One day the Bishop in frustration asked him,
  “Have you prayed at all before marrying this girl?” and the man told
  him, “I prayed everyday for six months!” The Bishop asked him, “What
  did you say to God?” The man said, I said, “God please let me marry
  this girl!”
  Accepting the will of God as the best option for me, is a difficult
  concept for many young people. One young woman told me once, “I
  will accept the will of God in every thing except for marriage!” And I
  asked her Why? She said, “Because I know that the will of God will be
  that I marry a deacon who teaches in Sunday School who will be boring to live with!” I told her, “Can’t God choose for you a deacon who
  teaches in Sunday School who will be fun to live with?”
  Another young man who attended a retreat where we spoke about
  the will of God in my marriage, stood up objecting violently to what I
  was proposing. He told me, “When it comes to marriage, I want to be
  the master of my own destiny!” I told him in response, “If you ignore
  the will of God in the process of choosing your spouse, you will become
  the master of your own disaster!”
  I like to give to our young people this parable; your life is like a boat
  where two people have to work, one has to row and the other has to
  hold the rudder (the device that directs the boat to turn right or left).
  A wise person would hand the rudder to the Lord and say, “Lord, hold
  the rudder and I will row!” Unfortunately, many times we insist on
  holding the rudder and we want God to row!
  One benefit of accepting the will of God as your preferred option is
  that, whatever life brings your way, you will have no fear, knowing that
  if God willed this for me, it is certainly good, perfect and acceptable,
  even if -in the short term-I don’t like it."
  
  Prayers of the saints help you in this decision
• mabsoota

  May 2009

  the post above is quite long, but read it!
  it's worth more than 20 short posts  :)
• Mira8388h

  May 2009

  Wow... thank you soo much! I know I made the right decision but it is just emotions are getting to me! I will def. let God hold the rudder and I will row! :) I will go and do whatever he wants me to! :)
  
  pray for me,
  bentBABAyasooa`
• coolboy1000g

  May 2009

  Thats great to hear and God will always guide you when you give him the permission to do so :)
  
  and above all, pray