Why You Overthink Every Decision

Underneath the two columns sits one question: whether you are still safe if you choose wrong. Paul answers it from the cross.

Overthinking is what a mind does when it believes the outcome depends entirely on the quality of its own thinking. It looks like carefulness from outside and feels like responsibility from inside, and underneath it sits a sentence two words long. On me. On me to see around the corner, to weigh what cannot be weighed, to hold it together after the choice is made.

I have watched careful people run the same two columns on a legal pad for a week and a half and come no closer to an answer, because the columns were never the trouble. Either side of a real decision can be argued well. Nobody agonizes for days over a question he cannot answer. He agonizes over a question he is afraid to answer.

And what is the fear actually about? Rarely the salary or the commute. It is the quiet certainty that if you choose wrong you will have done it to yourself, with nobody to blame and nothing underneath to catch you. That is a question about who is holding what, asked by someone who has already concluded the answer is himself.

The Argument Paul Makes From the Largest Thing Down

Romans 8 builds toward the most secure paragraph Paul ever wrote, and he gets there by arguing about price. He has just told a suffering church that God works all things together for good, which is exactly the sort of sentence a worried person cannot make himself trust. So he stops asserting and starts reasoning.

He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? (Romans 8:32, NKJV)

That is an argument from the greater down to the lesser, the oldest reasonable argument there is. A father who sold the farm to pay for his son's surgery is not the man you worry about over bus fare home. What has already been spent settles the question of what gets withheld later, and Paul is pointing at the largest sum ever paid.

Watch what he actually asks. His question is about withholding, and he puts it to a God who had already laid His own Son on the table before you had done one thing to recommend yourself. So what do you picture Him holding back now? Wisdom about a job? Steadiness in a city you have never lived in? Paul puts it as a question because the cross has already answered it.

Where Your Life Is Kept While You Decide

Part of what makes a decision unbearable is the sense that your whole life is laid out on the table beside the legal pad, exposed, and one bad move sweeps it onto the floor. Paul writes to the Colossians as people who have already died and already been raised with Christ, and then he tells them where their life is stored.

For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. (Colossians 3:3, NKJV)

Hidden is a strong verb, and the tense Paul puts it in is stronger. It is a perfect: placed somewhere at a point in the past and sitting there still. A family keeps its birth certificates and the deed to the house in a fireproof box at the back of a closet, and the reason is plain. Some things are too important to leave where the day can get at them.

That is what God did with the truest thing about you. It is in the box, the box is Christ, and Christ is in God, which puts two walls between your identity and your worst decision. You can take the wrong job. You can move somewhere harder than the brochure suggested and give years to work that goes nowhere. Does any of that reach into the closet?

The God You Can Ask Twice

So the choice still has to be made, and no sign is going up in the sky over the two columns. What grace changes is the amount riding on the result. Where do you go for actual wisdom, then? James wrote to a scattered and anxious church, people making hard decisions in a hurry, and he told them plainly.

If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him. (James 1:5, NKJV)

The phrase without reproach describes a giver who hands the thing over and then says nothing about it afterward. He makes no remark on how long you took to ask, or on this being the fourth time this month you have brought Him the same question. James pairs it with liberally, which means openhandedly and at scale, and both words describe the same hand that did not spare His own Son.

What You Are Free to Get Wrong

You may still get it wrong. That is the honest thing nobody says to the person frozen at the counter, and it is survivable, because a God who gave up His Son for you will not lose track of you over a choice made in good faith. A job that does not work out is a job that does not work out, a lonely city is a hard season, and a life absorbs both.

Does either one have the standing to reopen what the cross closed about you? The pad on the counter still says what it said this morning, the two columns are still close, and the choice is yours to make with the information you have. So make it. Pick up the phone, and if it goes badly you will be a person who chose badly and is still hidden with Christ in God, which is who you were when you sat down.