Choices

May 18, 2023

From Joseph Wamack

What a wonderful privilege it is to be able to choose today! The dictionary describes “choosing” as “to select freely and after consideration.” What a brilliant idea-to have different options and to have the capability to decide after thought and consideration, what it is you want to do or be or think.

Sometimes the choice is as simple as when checking out at the grocery store and the bagger asks if you want paper or plastic-or perhaps you are very “green” and you bring your own reusable bags from home-good job if you do! Or if you go to Baskin Robbins for ice cream and you must choose which one of the 31 flavors best suits your taste at that particular moment. And then again-why choose just one scoop and one flavor?! Why not a double (or a triple) scoop!? Music is my passion-I have 12,000 songs on my phone-I could choose any of them-what is it I want to listen to today? The choice is mine! Thanks ITunes!

Sometimes the choice we must make is about lifestyle-how and where we want to live, sometimes about relationships-who are the people in our lives? Are they building us up or tearing us down? Sometimes about a career, a move across the country, a person, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the way we spend our time. The number of choices we make is staggering. Sometimes a choice can even be life and death, as when Shakespeare states in Hamlet, “To be or not to be? That is the question.”

Life is full of choices and choosing. I would like to suggest today that the greatest gift God ever gave us, after the gift of His own Son, was the ability to choose. In fact, I would offer up that this is what it means to be made in the image of God. It is not that God had two arms, two legs and one nose, so He made us that way too. I believe what it means to be made in the image of God was that when He created humans; He gave us the ability to think, to do and to choose. We are not animals-controlled by instinct or passion. We are humans-God’s children, with full use of our incredible brains.

Choose wisely today, my friends! Choose you, this day, who you will serve. Your life is nothing more than the sum of all the choices you have made-it all depends on choices. And thank God for the gift of being able to make choices.