We all want to be convinced. When it comes to holding our beliefs about life, no one wants to have completely open hands. 

There’s comfort in being convinced that you’ve grasped the truth of things as they really are—or perhaps, that you’ve been grasped by the truth.

The state of being convinced (or conviction) has a peculiar, less-than-objective quality to it. But this isn’t how we instinctively think of our own belief-forming investigative process. We imagine ourselves as examining evidence dispassionately, determining which belief is most likely, “unbiased.” 

And yet, a quick glance at how many people’s convictional beliefs align with their emotionally, aesthetically preferred worldviews quickly disproves such fancies of “objectivity.”

This is not a critique, but an observation. I don’t think there’s any other way humans could—or should—hold our beliefs than in the subjective ways we do. Conviction is not something held by objects, after all, but by subjects. 

When You Know That You Already Know

I’ve recently found myself somewhere I know I’m going to be staying for a while. Spiritually, as well as circumstantially. 

It’s taken me a while to break ground, so I’ll say thank you for your patience. I’m learning that when it comes to waiting, the Holy Spirit literally has nothing but patience. 

Here, I was waiting for conviction to settle in—that comfortingly iron-clad sense that I would just know when I felt it—that what I was choosing and valuing and seeing was the clearest version of what was really there. But conviction doesn’t roll in like the weather and equilibrate your dry circumstances just because you’ve stayed in one place long enough. It doesn’t even catch you all in a sudden downpour when you let yourself wander around the map, sampling the atmospheres of other locales to see if they have the rainfall you’ve been needing. Conviction might only find you when you make a choice, an investment, a commitment—not because you’re certain or smitten, but because you’re sure enough to know that you already know what you need to know in order to trust.

Simplifying that last sentence? Sometimes you know that what you need isn’t more info, and that your next step can only be beautiful trust.  

The most important thing that happens in your life is what you do after you reach that place.

Get A Conviction

I always find it to be a Christian “tell” when someone uses the word “convicted” in a certain way. 

Outside of Christian spaces, “convictions” are things that happen in court rooms. Within Christendom, conviction is what happens when someone decides to quit Netflix, feels the pang to apologize for gossip, or goes to church instead of staying home in jammies.

Yet, the judicial aspect of conviction might be something worth considering in the personally-held beliefs conversation. A conviction is the judge’s binding assessment of one’s state, the non-negotiable reckoning of their standing. I said at the outset that “we all want to be convinced.” Doesn’t it still hold if I say, “we all want to be convicted”?

(The words aren’t really so different, but since the way we use them is, they kind of are.) 

“Convinced” postures itself as purely rational; “convicted,” perhaps more honestly, encompasses an element of passion in the holding of our beliefs. “Conviction” could be said to acknowledge that my beliefs aren’t the sole result of an objective judge; they’re also the consequence of my freely willed choices. 

There’s a comfort in hoping that convictions will come for you, arrest you out of your indecision, and then lock you up in a secure, impregnable worldview (against your inconvenient free will). Maybe they do—but not without some pretty brash choices being made first. A swift conviction might be involuntary and irreversible when it finally does come for someone, but before that, action—passionate, bold, uncertain action—is always taken.

Of Bedsheets and Sail Boats

Sometimes the least obedient thing in creation is a personal will waiting to act on God’s will. (Sometimes.) 

God’s world is a thing that moves. It’s a moving world full of parts that move—for something in it to stop moving would be indistinguishable from that thing falling off the world, blinking out of time. Nothing does nothing.

The only part of the world that sins is the will. And (unless scientists ever reach Absolute Zero on the Kelvin scale) it’s also the only part capable of standing still. 

To be sure, waiting and discernment are among the wisest disciplines that a Christian can cultivate, but they’re not static. If “discerning” my next step in a decision means waiting for God to take away my faculty of decision-making by forcing my hand, or virtually insisting on Him to give me an indisputable sign, then I’m asking Him to make my will something other than it is: an imperfect organ of personal responsibility designed to accompany and further my trust-relationship with Him. 

Openness to God’s leading doesn’t mean making no choices, doing anything only if he pushes you there against your will. 

Your will is part of God’s creation that needs to be in motion, just like all things are. And for a will to be put into motion, it doesn’t mean endlessly sampling options; it means making—and sticking with—choices. 

Your will is a good thing. Openness to his leading means making decisions and watching God press into them—like wind filling a sail, rather than a scrap of fabric blown by the breeze. 

The wind can’t do anything meaningful with a bedsheet draped over a line. But a sail is a different story. Tied down, firmly fixed, the resistance of definitively chosen anchoring points doesn’t make the sail immobile. Instead, it’s exactly what makes definitive direction and purposefulness possible.

And just like affixing or angling a sail isn’t what moves the boat (that’s still the wind’s job), God Himself is the driving force in charge of where a life goes. Our decisions don’t take away God’s ability to act—they don’t even threaten such an impossibility—rather, our choices frame where we will see God act in definitive ways.

The Final Surrender

By the same instinct that we all want to be convinced: no one ever wants to convince themselves of a belief. The comfort would flood right out of the fortress of a worldview if we knew we’d just selected the one we liked best. No—being captured by a belief is the elusive experience sought after for true conviction. 

If we can’t choose a belief (because then it wouldn’t be real), but we can’t just wait for conviction to snatch us away (because that doesn’t happen—we have free will for a reason), then what’s a would-be believer to do?

The answer is an unpopular word in modernity: submit. 

Submission is the only solution. It’s an active response of the will; to willingly suspend the free ability to turn elsewhere, to pursue other options. And yet, it’s also the enchanted response of an aesthetically, morally, existentially overcome soul: to become resistanceless and yield to the higher claim of a belief larger than oneself. 

Merely choosing our own beliefs lands us in the presence of nothing so great as where awed submission can take us. And, passive though the personal response becomes, submission is the true opposite of a static or noncommittal engagement of the will. 

Find a beauty, a belief, the Truth worth submitting to…and do it. 

My hope is that, of all the climbs you’ve been on, one of them will lead to a summit, a wide open place arrived at from the Good Path you’ve chosen, leading you to be swept into the captivating beauty of its vista. From there, when its sublimity courses through your soul like the beating of your heart, when all the Breathtaking fills your senses like the air fills your lungs, it’s there that I pray you and I will make the choice not to look elsewhere. 

There, may we have the boldness, the passion, the commitment to submit to something bigger than ourselves, and may we plant our flag of surrender only in such ground as that. Only when we do that can we look up and see our own flag doing what it was always meant to: being carried and made animate by the Wind.