Decision Making Guidelines

It seems like it is a rare person who isn’t being confronted right now with a tough decision, whether it is about college, marriage, parenting, career, or finances.

Awhile back when I was trying to make an important decision, I prepared the following "Decision Making Guidelines" with suggestions gleaned from Steve Deal (a missionary to the Phillipines), Elmer Towns (Biblical scholar and teacher), Matt Gregory (a local pastor), Rick Warren (author of The Purpose Driven Life), and Oswald Chambers (author of "My Utmost for His Highest").

Understand Who the decision-maker really is. The Bible tells us, “A man's steps are of the Lord,” (Proverbs 20:24) so: “Commit your works to the LORD, And your thoughts will be established.” (Proverbs 16:3)

Commit the decision to a time of fasting and prayer. For me it usually is a forty-day time period. The fast I try to do is to refrain from all drinks other than juice and water; from all sweets, snacks and desserts; from any food during the day other than an oatmeal breakfast; and then to enjoy whatever meal Nancy has prepared for dinner, but have no snacks after that meal, other than juice or more oatmeal if I am still hungry.

The purpose of a fast is not for any health reason, it is so that when you have a desire for whatever it is you are fasting from, you use that as a prompt -- a cue -- to pray. (Ezra 8:23 “So we fasted and entreated our God for this, and He answered our prayer.”) Being a donut junkie and a coffee-holic, I have lots of prompts to pray during my fasts.

Search the Scriptures. During this forty-day decision making period, every morning I review the "Decision Making Guidelines" and the Bible verses that might be applicable to each one and pray through the process, being careful not to pre-decide the issue before the end of the forty-day decision making period. (Psalm 119:105 “Your word is a lamp to my feet And a light to my path.”)

Look at the pros, cons and alternatives on paper. This step was also a favorite decision-making tool of Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln. It helps us to think through choices to see them in black and white. Each morning I would move a little bit farther through the decision making process, pray over what the alternatives of the decision might be and as they are revealed, write them down across the top of a chart. Not all the alternatives may be revealed at one time. Just write them down as the Lord reveals them to you. (Luke 14:28 “For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it-”)

Seek Godly counsel. Write down the responses which the Lord reveals to you directly during prayer or indirectly through the counsel of others. (Prov. 11:14 “Where there is no counsel, the people fall; But in the multitude of counselors there is safety.”)

Compare your alternative decisions with the gifts of service God has given you. How do the various alternatives fit with your gifts? Do you have a heart or a passion for the alternative(s)? How does each alternative fit with your abilities? Your personality? (I Cor. 7:7(b) “…each one has his own gift from God, one in this manner and another in that.”)

Look at the connection between your alternative decisions and your life experiences. We may think our heart or our commonsense is driving our decision, but God has been directing our steps through our life experiences, both good and bad. Keep in mind that God prepared Moses and Joseph for their life's work through their bad experiences. (Prov. 16:9 “A man's heart plans his way, But the LORD directs his steps.”)

Seriously consider how the alternatives fit with the Golden Rule. Would a particular alternative be for the good of others? Would the alternative hurt anyone? (Matt. 7:12 “Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”)

Total up the decision each column adds up to. At the end of the forty-day decision making period --and not before—the final decision is the column that has all positives and no negatives. Since you first identified God as the decision-maker, and you then saturated the decision making process with prayer and fasting, accept the fact that God HAS made the decision for you and He then showed it to you when you totaled up each column.

Trust in God and take the NEXT step. After that, you are ready to follow Oswald Chambers' advice to now trust in God and take the NEXT step. Don't let concerns about the second, third or twelfth step deter you, all God asks you to do is to take the next step. He will be waiting for you there.

Throughout it all, don’t forget Hudson Taylor’s line, “God always gives the best to those who leave the choice to Him.”

The Long Lines Leading to Freedom

I’ve been thinking about long lines this week.

There was a long line of solemn faced friends and neighbors who showed up at the funeral home on visitation night to walk past the casket of 23 year-old Private First Class Edwin Anthony “E.J.” Andino, II, to put an arm around his grandpa’s shoulders, to hug his weeping mom, Kathy, and to shake the hands of his painfully stoic dad and brother.

E.J. was killed September 3, 2006 when an improvised explosive device detonated near his Humvee while he was responding to a mortar attack against a U.S. Army camp in Baghdad. He joined 2nd Lt. Leonard Cowherd as our town’s fatalities from the Iraq war.

I will never forget the long line of hundreds of uniformed American Airlines pilots and attendants that filed into the Culpeper Baptist Church sanctuary when we had the funeral for Ken and Jennifer Lewis, a married couple who both worked as flight attendants. Ken and Jennifer had arranged to work the same flight so that they could have some beach time together. Instead, they died when their plane, American’s Flight 77 to Los Angeles, was hijacked by followers of Osama bin Laden and flown into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

Our town has mourned and honored our two flight attendants who died on 9/11 and our two soldiers who died in Iraq, and on September 9, 2006 we formed a long line of flag-waving citizens on the road to the school auditorium where we rejoiced and celebrated the safe return of the 3rd/317th U.S. Army Reserve Unit coming home from its 16 months of service in Iraq.

At that homecoming ceremony, battalion commander Lt.Col. Robert P. Chappell, Jr., said, “What it takes to be brave is sacrifice.” He gestured toward the family members of the unit sitting in the bleachers and thanked them for the sacrifices they had made while their loved ones were deployed.  He never mentioned the sacrifice made by he and his own family.

The previous November, Lt.Col. Chappell had to leave his position near the Syria-Iraq border and come back home for his 16 year-old daughter’s heart surgery. He was able to stay long enough to be at her hospital bedside and to join his family for a Thanksgiving dinner at a Cracker Barrel restaurant. He was not able to stay for his older daughter’s wedding three weeks later. "It will be one of those life-altering events that I'll miss," he said.

One of our local reporters, Katie Dolac, grew up as a career soldier’s child. She went to Ken and Jennifer Lewis’ gravesite to do an article on the 9/11 anniversary, but she came away with the realization that they were actually a part of her own life story.

Katie wrote: “Staring at those names, Ken and Jennifer Lewis on the five-year anniversary of 9/11 - coincidentally my dad’s birthday - I was overcome, even though they were strangers to me. A lifetime of patriotism and sacrifice culminated in that very moment. All of a sudden the reason for a lifetime of sacrifice, the reason I lived a rootless existence, the reason my dad took us to all those battlefields and taught us all those patriotic songs was very clear to me. My dad’s job was never more real, the innocent lives lost were never more real and the ultimate sacrifice of soldiers such as 2nd Lt. Leonard Cowherd and PFC. E.J. Andino and their respective families was never more appreciated.”

Lt.Col. Chappell said he carried the flag of the Culpeper Minutemen, emblazoned with its motto, “Liberty or Death”, and Virginia’s flag with its motto, “Thus always to Tyrants”, to towns, villages and battlegrounds throughout Iraq.

There is a long, long line of tyrants and dictators who see the mottos carried by Lt.Col. Chappell as the greatest threat in the world to their own selfish existence: Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea; KIM Jong Un of North Korea, Isaias Afewerki of Eritrea, Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan, and the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran, to name just a few.

But there is an even longer line of brave and sacrificial folks who are willing to live, serve and die so that others can be free.

The Bible verse that E.J.’s family had printed into his funeral card tells the reason they serve: “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.”

Looking Back in Time for the Right Candidate Today

Theodore Roosevelt was a statesman who desired to put his core beliefs on the front line of his public life, not on the back shelf. Looking back in time at his public life may help us make better decisions about whom we’ll choose to elect in our upcoming elections.

When Theodore Roosevelt was New York City's Police Commissioner, there was wide-spread corruption in the police department. He canceled the annual parade of the police, saying: “We will parade only when we have nothing to be ashamed of.”

When he was in the New York Legislature, he sought the impeachment of a corrupt judge. He kept the fight going for eight days: on the first day no other legislator would vote with him and against the Party bosses. On the eighth day, after Roosevelt had rallied the people and the press, the judge was impeached by a vote of 104 to 6.

After Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901 upon the assassination of William McKinley by an anarchist's bullet, he continued to fight for what was straight, and good, and true—and he explained why he did so.

“After a week spent on perplexing problems”, Roosevelt said, “[I]t does so rest my soul to come into the house of the Lord and to sing and mean it, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty.’ My great joy and glory is that, in occupying an exalted position in the nation, I am enabled to preach the practical morality of the Bible to my fellow-countrymen and to hold up Christ as the hope and Savior of the world.”

In a speech given in Kansas City on May 1st, 1903, President Roosevelt presented his formula for how to continue our progress as a nation while addressing the turmoil caused by immigration, rapid growth, and social change: 

No device that the wit of man can produce, no form of law or of organization among ourselves can supply the lack of fundamental virtues the absence of which has meant the downfall of any nation since the world began. No smartness, no cleverness, unaccompanied by the sense of moral responsibility will ever supply the presence of fundamental precepts put forth in the Bible and put forth in the code of morals of every successful nation in the history of the world from antiquity to modern times.

... We are not going to make any new commandments at this stage of the world's progress that will take the place of the old ones. The truths that were spoken on Mount Sinai are truths today. The things that were true when the Golden Rule was promulgated are true now… [A]nd the man is no real friend of his country, no real friend of any set of people in the country, if he appeals to the people only from the standpoint of asking them to see that they get their full share and omits to ask them to do full justice to others also.

[T]here is no patent device for getting good citizenship. We need strong bodies; we need more than that; we need strong minds, and, more than that, we need character into which many elements enter, the principal ones being honesty in its widest and deepest sense, decency and morality.

Teddy Roosevelt gave a speech At the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia on June 16, 1903, which provided us with a good description of the type of people we need to look for today to be our elected officials:

In civil life we need decency, honesty and the spirit that makes the man a good husband, a good father, a good neighbor and a good man to work alongside of or to deal with. That makes a man, consequently, who does his duty by the State. The worst crime against this nation which can be committed by any man is the crime of dishonesty, whether in public life, or whether in private life, and we are not to be excused as a people if we ever condone such dishonesty, no matter what other qualities it may be associated with.

The pages upon which I read Theodore Roosevelt’s speeches were yellowed and brittle with age, but the force and truth of his central message is as true today as it was then.

The Magna Carta and Our Vote

“It’s just one vote.”

That’s not what King John thought when he was forced to sign the Magna Carta.

King John was the perfect picture of an absolute dictator and he had wanted it to stay that way.  John came into power by murdering the expected heir to the throne, his nephew Arthur – or so it was rumored.

King John promptly laid an oppressive level of taxation on his people. Anyone who complained was taken before the courts. As king he ruled the courts, and everyone who lost a case in his courts had to pay exorbitant fines to his appointed sheriffs and bailiffs in order to be released from his prisons. The king’s sheriffs and bailiffs were uniformly corrupt because he sold those royal positions for the best price he could get.

When the royal fines, levies and taxes were not enough, he forced his barons and their vassals into war to protect the lands he already had and to get even more. When a loyal baron died in battle, King John would sell to the highest bidder the right to marry the baron’s widow and thus take on all of the dead baron’s titles and feudal estates. If the widow objected, he would kidnap her children and put her into a dungeon until she either changed her mind or died.

Understandably, the barons wanted to kill King John and had begun a civil war with that intention. King John, of course, wanted to keep the power to do whatever he wanted, and the leading churchman, Stephen, Archbishop of Canterbury, wanted them all to follow God’s law, have a peaceable reconciliation, and provide an orderly form of government for their vassals.

After the barons succeeded in capturing London, they consented with Stephen to meet the king in the meadow at Runnymeade and, if King John agreed to their 63 demands --and especially their proposed mechanism for holding the king accountable to them-- they agreed they would end the civil war and once again swear loyalty to the king.

To encourage King John’s signature and to persuade him not to spring a trap of his own at Runnymeade, all around the edges of the bowl-shaped pasture rose the British fighting men, particularly the Scots, the brothers, fathers, sons, uncles, cousins and nephews of the women and children whom King John had consigned to the hell of his dungeons and the rapine of his mortgaged marriages.

King John was thus forced to sign the Magna Carta, written by Stephen, Archbishop of Canterbury, in June of the year 1215, and with his signature he made the royal family subject to the rule of law, and accountable to the people through the first-ever representative democracy. The longest and most important portion of the Great Charter was the "security clause" in clause 61, which established a committee, a parliament, of 25 Barons who could at any time meet and VOTE to over-rule the will of the King, by seizing his castles and possessions with force if needed. The interlocking concepts of servant leadership were abhorrent to King John and to every tyrant since him.

The Magna Carta may be eight centuries old but it is still the document our courts refer to when they discuss “the Law of the Land.” The U.S. Supreme Court has cited the Magna Carta in support of its rulings scores of times in the past half-century, most recently in Southern Union Co. v. United States, 567 U.S. ___ 1194 (June 21, 2012). The Supreme Court has continued to cite the Magna Carta so often, even in recent history, because: “we are heirs to a tradition given voice 800 years ago by Magna Carta, which, on the barons’ insistence, confined executive power by ‘the law of the land.’” Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507, 552 (2004)

We still have warriors who wield against the kings of our government the power created by the Magna Carta, the power of the ballot. You can be one of those warriors we now call “citizens” and “voters.”

It’s just one vote --- and it makes you more powerful than a king.

Faith of the Fathers

RELIGION AND MATTERS OF FAITH CONTAINED IN THE PRESIDENTS' INAUGURAL ADDRESSES FROM GEORGE WASHINGTON TO GEORGE W. BUSH

Edited with notes by J. Michael Sharman.

Price: $14.95
FREE SHIPPING

J. Michael Sharman Biography

J. Michael Sharman has served as an attorney and guardian ad litem for children over the past quarter-century.   

He frequently represents survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse both as a guardian ad litem and as a private civil attorney. On behalf of a 14 year-old sexual assault victim, Mike won the largest sexual assault jury verdict in Virginia’s history (at $50.25 million, it was also the largest jury verdict in Virginia for the year 2005). In 2012, he won a $15.4 million verdict on behalf of a 14 year-old sexual abuse victim who had been fondled by a man using false credentials to pose as a clinical psychologist.

As an appellate counsel, he has four published cases and nine unpublished ones, all of which were in the area of family or domestic relations law.

Since 2003, Mike and his wife, Nancy, have been Mandatory Parent Education presenters (using the Transparenting® curriculum) in Virginia’s 16th and 20th Judicial Districts.

Mike has a B.A. in International Relations from Mary Washington College, a J.D. from the University of Wyoming College of Law, and an LL.M. in International Taxation from Regent University.



Contact information: 

J. Michael Sharman
Commonwealth Law Offices, P.C.
246 E. Davis Street, Suite 200
Culpeper, Virginia 22701
Voice: (540) 727-1007
Facsimile: (540) 727-7917