WHEN wrestling with a knotty problem, many Christians have experienced trying God on the metaphorical white phone, only to find a rather puzzling buzz on the line. The businessmen Iain Dunbar and Peter Wilkinson share your frustration and have written a book to try to help.

Good Call: Learning to make decisions with God is deliberately accessible in style, as the two of them take it in turns to workshop you through a better process. They start by asking you to learn from your own history, by recalling your past decisions and charting them on a timeline, good and bad. Reflecting on them will teach you your own tendencies under pressure. The authors remind you that good decisions, even hard ones with difficult consequences, will always give you a sense of peace, while the less good ones will tend to prey on your mind and feel somehow unresolved.

Using examples from the Bible and from their own careers, they set out a process for learning how to discern God’s voice in the noise. It requires patience to develop what they liken to “good taste”, and the hallmark of a bad decision will often be that it was rushed. But starting to make every decision with God, no matter how small, trains you in the way. This habit holds you in relationship and teaches you to listen.

The accumulation of all your decisions hones in you the development of a settled conscience, which becomes over time an ever more reliable guide as you learn to discern the path God wants you to take. And if you are ever really stuck? They remind you to cry to the Lord, and sleep on it. Joy will come in the morning, and you will always feel peaceful when you have got it right.
 

Dr Eve Poole writes on theology, economics, and leadership.

Good Call: Learning to make decisions with God
Iain R. Dunbar and Peter R. Wilkinson
BRF £12.99
(978-1-80039-218-2)
Church Times Bookshop £11.69