Make plans by seeking advice; if you wage war, obtain guidance (Proverbs 20:18).

Moving to Amsterdam was one of the most difficult decisions that my wife and I ever had to make.  The facts were clear:  there was a demonstrable need for new churches in the city; there was an exciting new initiative to meet that need, developing within our movement (the Great Commission Association); and we were not just available, but even being aggressively recruited to be a part of this new initiative... But on the other hand, we were Americans who would be moving a long way from home; we were only marginally familiar with the other people who would be participating in the initiative, and we were generally quite inexperienced (in our early-20s, with a grand total of two weeks of on-the-ground experience of Amsterdam).  So even though the facts were clear, not much else about the situation was clear at all.

We did a lot of praying.  We did a lot of thinking and deliberating among the two of us.  But we never did reach a moment of epiphany -- when God radically focused our thoughts on one particular truth and gave us the supernatural insight that would have made such a decision easier for us.

Instead, we fell back on the wisdom of the Proverbs -- making our plans by seeking advice.  In a lot of ways, we really did feel like a move to Amsterdam would be kind of like going to war.  So we realized that we needed to obtain guidance.  We talked to our parents and our siblings.  We talked to our friends and church leaders.  We talked to other potential members of the church-planting team.  We talked with just about anyone who would listen to our deliberations.  And we asked them for their advice, their guidance.  "What do you think?"  We'd ask with as much of an open end as possible.  "But what about this?"  We'd play one set of counsel off of another -- trying to get a well-rounded perspective and not just pushes down the hill of some inevitable predetermined preference.  We sought counsel over an extended period of time, not just one-and-done conversations with random individuals.  We tried to listen sincerely to what others were telling us and not just filter it through whatever personal opinion seemed to be predominant at the time.  We sought advice.  We obtained guidance.

In the end, the advice didn't make the decision a whole lot easier for us (after all, the facts at hand were still the facts at hand).  But it did give us greater confidence in making a more well-rounded decision.  And in the end, I was so glad that we took the time and effort to go through such a process of seeking advice and obtaining guidance.  In all my life experience, I've seen the benefit of godly counsel -- whether it's for making career decisions, relationship decisions, ministry decisions, or financial decisions.  It helps to alert us to "blind spots" in our thinking.  It helps to safeguard us from making split-second emotional decisions.  It helps to weigh all the pros and cons of a given situation.  It makes our "plans" and our "wars" go a whole lot more smoothly.  If you take any one piece of decision-making advice from me, let it be this:  Seek advice from others.