The Choice Is Yours
Life is full of choices, as anyone can see by taking a brief trip to a fast-food restaurant.
Would you like your burger well done or rare? Sesame seed or sourdough bun? Hot sauce or mild sauce? As for the fries, would you like regular fries or curly cheese fries?
Similar choices confront you at the grocery store. Simply trying to choose a breakfast cereal can turn into a complex decision-making process that requires a selection from among hundreds of varied choices.
Even watching television involves making choices. Decades ago, there were three major broadcast channels.
Today, most cable services offer dozens of choices, and some satellite dish systems offer hundreds.
Sociologists have a term that describes our current abundance of options for everything from food to TV to spiritual paths and “lifestyle options.”
They say twenty-first-century people suffer from an affliction called “overchoice.”
Some choices aren’t very important. There may be two or more different routes you can take when you’re traveling to the store or the kids’ school, but you’ll reach your destination sooner or later, whichever way you go.
In other cases, the decisions we make have important and possibly even life-changing consequences.
Some TV shows are entertaining and possibly even thoughtful. Others are mind-numbing, soul-stunting ex¬ercises in crassness and exploitation.
Perhaps the most important choices we will ever face are those recurring issues where we must choose between life and death, blessings and curses.
Will the way you punish your child teach him to honor and obey authority, or will it cause resentment and rebellion?
Will the way you run your business be a testimony to your depen¬dence on God, or will it be a declaration of your complete dedication to looking out for yourself?
Will your decisions about everything from the fate of unborn children to the health of the environment reflect your concern with life, or will you unconsciously be using your God-given free will to support a culture of death?
The options are clear and the consequences—unlike those at fast-food restaurants—are significant. Now it’s up to us.
God, thank you for the gift of free will. Help me use it wisely by making the right choices.