That’s what life is: choices. From cradle to grave, what we do is choose. Unbeknownst to itself, a baby chooses to cry when unhappy. Throughout our lives, we are instantaneously and automatically immobilized by sudden loss, or without thinking, smile when delighted. Unrealized and sometimes uncontrolled, an elder’s moan is the body’s choice to express its pain. But for the most part, choices are known, realized, and deliberate.
Years ago I came to understand that perhaps the most important choices we make have to do with those things about us that we can’t control: the weather, the government, what other people say and do, and how and when and where they say and do it. We can’t change them, but we can decide how we’re going to respond to them. We can’t choose our reactions, but we do choose our responses.
Reaction or Response
My first month at a new church, a 13-year-old girl chose one of those permanent solutions to what were probably temporary problems. She shot herself with her own shotgun. As I viewed her in her coffin, her teen-aged friends sobbing nearby, I asked the funeral director, “You couldn’t get that frown off her face?” He nodded a no. Never have I seen an expression so determined, so angry.
I spoke to the classmates at her funeral service about the difference between reaction and response. Reacting, I said, is automatic: you shiver, your teeth chatter or you have goose bumps when you’re cold. Responding to the cold is choosing to turn up the thermostat, put on a sweater or wrap up in a blanket.
With today’s personal computers so numerous, it occurs to me that life is like sitting in front of a computer—a huge computer whose program contains every single choice or decision we could ever face or make. It’s all there; but we sit at the keyboard and touch the keys— changing the screen with every touch. And with each touch, there is another option to be chosen. The possibilities are all within reach, but we decide which we will deal with next, and how we will respond to them.
Opens the Future
If I could share one learned truth with every young person on this planet, it would be this: the best choice is always that which opens up future choices for you. If the choice you are about to make limits your future choices, think again! And don’t consider only the next available options, but look on down the road a way, and imagine the possible choices which will come as a result of the one you are considering— and the next, and the next.....
Above all, know that you don’t have to make your decisions alone. We have been given the presence of the Holy Spirit precisely because we need that Spirit’s help to make the best decisions for us at the moment we’re faced with them. The best choice is always to let the Spirit help. If in doubt, know that any choice made out of fear is likely to lead us astray. The right choice is always the choice made out of love.
JoAn Lent Skyrme is a UCC pastor living in Belmont IA.