What to Do When You Don't Know What to Do

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvcF1x1K0Xc

Sooner or later, everybody stands at a crossroads.

Maybe it's a college decision, or a career move, or a relationship you're not sure about.

Maybe it's whether it's time to have kids, time to leave a job, or time to pack up and move somewhere new. For a moment, the options feel almost unlimited — and that's exactly what makes it so hard.

Because walking down one road means walking away from another. And the road less traveled is often the one we regret the most.

It's not that you can't change your mind later. It's that it gets harder to do that over time. So the question isn't whether you'll face a big decision. It's what you'll do when you don't know what to do.

Here's some everyday wisdom for the future — three simple ideas drawn from one of the most quoted passages ever written.

The Riskiest Move Is Doing Nothing

Proverbs 3:5a — "Trust in the Lord with all your heart."

When a real decision lands in front of us, we tend to make one of two mistakes.

The first is pretending we already know the answer and rushing. That's like taking off without a flight plan.

The second is the opposite — the "paralysis of analysis." We circle the runway for so long that we never actually land the plane. We tell ourselves we're being careful. But here's what we forget: not making a decision ends up making the decision for you.

So what do you do when you genuinely don't know?

The wisdom of Proverbs says step one is to trust in the Lord. In plain terms, it's keeping a vertical perspective when you're facing a horizontal decision. It's admitting something most of us hate to admit — that we can't make the right call entirely on our own.

That takes humility. And humility is hard.

But you don't have to map out the whole road today. You just have to bring the first step to the One who can already see the end of it.

You Can't See the Whole Map

Proverbs 3:5b — "Do not depend on your own understanding."

The next piece of wisdom is a warning: trust God, not yourself. He knows things you don't.

Don't choose a direction just because it looks easy. Don't choose it because everyone else is going that way. And don't choose it based on what someone else expects from you.

Why? Because when we depend only on our own understanding, we're working from a partial map. Only God sees every traffic jam, detour, and accident that's waiting around the corner.

If you've lived any amount of life, you've felt this. At sixteen, a lot of us thought we knew it all — and it turned out we didn't know anything at all. As young adults, we thought we had all the answers, when really we weren't even asking the right questions.

So here's a secret that will put you ahead of most people: you don't know anything until you accept the fact that you don't know everything.

This is also why "follow your heart" is shaky advice. Feelings change. The popular thing today gets reversed tomorrow. Don't follow your feelings — follow your faith. How you feel about things will change, but the One you've placed your faith in never will.

Every other guide, your emotions, your culture, your generation, can only take you so far down the road before you hit a dead end.

You Always Find What You're Looking For

Proverbs 3:6 — "Seek His will in all you do, and He will show you which path to take."

Here's a thought experiment. What would happen if we all actually asked God what He wanted for our lives?

Would things look largely the same, or radically different? Most people say radically different. And if that's true, it exposes something — that a lot of us are seeking our own will first and just hoping God will rubber-stamp the plans we've already made.

Someone once said, "You always find what you're looking for." So if you've never found God's will for your life, it's worth asking whether you've really been looking for it.

The mistake is treating faith like a category — the "spiritual" part of an otherwise self-directed life. But following Jesus isn't one slice of your life. It is your life. His will should show up in your relationships, on your calendar, and in your checkbook. His fingerprints should be on every area, not tucked into the margins.

Jesus said it directly: "Seek the Kingdom of God above all else… and he will give you everything you need."

God wants to meet all your needs. But He won't, until you realize He's all you need.

The Best Example We Have

The man who wrote most of Proverbs lived this out first.

When Solomon became king, God gave him a kind of "genie in the bottle" moment: "What do you want? Ask, and I will give it to you!" Solomon could have asked for anything — wealth, long life, victory over his enemies. Instead, he admitted he felt like a child who didn't know his way around, and he asked for an understanding heart to know right from wrong.

God was pleased. He gave Solomon the wisdom he asked for — and added the riches and fame he didn't.

That's how this works. When you put God first, everything else falls into place.

So if you trust God, you'll make the right decisions. If you depend on Him, you'll head in the right direction. If you look for His will, you'll walk in His ways and end up where He actually wants you to go.

And here's the part most people miss: we're all headed to heaven tomorrow — but some of us get to experience a little of it here on earth, today, because we looked for and lived out God's will instead of our own.

You don't have to face your future the way the world does. You can simply ask for wisdom. So ask.

This post is based on a sermon from our Everyday Wisdom series, preached at Cornerstone Bible Church on June 28, 2026.