What it means, rather, is that your life and happiness have been
mapped out ahead of time with a suffocating specificity. There is one
job — one particular, singular job — which is God’s Will For Your
Life. And there is one potential spouse — one particular, singular
spouse — who is GWFYL. And thus every decision which might in any way
lead toward or away from either of those must be pondered with an
agonizing consideration of just what is GWFYL. Every date (or
“courtship”), your choice of college (or Bible College) and choice of
major is a fork in the road leading closer to or farther from this
narrowly appointed happiness.

This notion of GWFYL transforms the process of living into something
like the fairy-tale path through the haunted forest — the Mirkwood
trail or the Yellow Brick Road. Except that those paths in those
stories are always clearly marked, whereas the trail of GWFYL is
invisible and inscrutable and can only be intuited by some visceral
sense of spiritual leading.

The idea is a kind of spiritualized version of the romantic pipe-dream
of The One — and it tends to produce the same fearfully tentative,
second-guessing approach to living. There’s a bit of good advice in
Conor Oberst’s “First Day,” in which he sings, “I’d rather be working
for a paycheck / than waiting to win the lottery.” But the notion of
GWFYL or of waiting for The One turns that advice upside-down, viewing
such practical work as a dangerous distraction from one’s
lottery-playing duties.

One reason I don’t much care for this idea of GWFYL is that I’ve seen
its effect on young evangelicals forced to shoulder its crushing
burden. No one can live like that, governed by an ultimate-stakes
gamble based on unwritten rules, offering no assurance other than that
the potential for inadvertent-but-damning disobedience lurks in every
decision.

Just as importantly, I don’t care for the way this notion takes
something explicitly clear and invariable — the will of God — and
twists it into something mysterious, ever-changing and idiosyncratic.

What is God’s Will For Your Life? the prophet asks, and then answers
his own question, “To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly
with your God.” That’s from the Bible — a book that’s rather
repetitive and unambiguous on the question of GWFYL.