Choices

Life is full of choices.

Sometimes they’re obvious ones that take little thought, like whether to have Marmite or Bovril on your toast (easy, the answer’s Marmite every time), others can be slightly more involved, like where to live, or what job to go for, or who to spend the rest of your life with. Whatever the choice though the most important fact is that we do have one. We need to exercise our will to make a decision one way or the other. Sometimes it may feel like we have too much choice and other times like we don’t really have any options at all, but whatever the circumstances, we still need to actively press the engagement button when the time comes to choose. Some of us love pressing buttons, we can do it all day long, others of us stress so much about whether to press the blue one or the red one that invariably somebody else steps right in to make the decision for us (which may very well be what we’d been secretly hoping for all along anyway). Whatever our level of activity or agonised passivity we can be assured that another choice is always there just around the corner waiting to be made.

As I’m thinking about choice I’m mindful of that very black and white, life and death, choice Moses challenged the nation of Israel with not long before he died. At the end of an epic speech he said this: ‘Today I have given you the choice between life and death, between blessings and curses. I call on heaven and earth to witness the choice you make. Oh, that you would choose life, that you and your descendants might live! Choose to love the Lord your God and to obey him and commit yourself to him, for he is your life. Then you will live long in the land the Lord swore to give your ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.’ (Deuteronomy 30: 19-20)

A rousing, heartfelt, love-filled challenge... and we all know how it turned out. Some chose life, many didn’t, but through it all and out of it came the greatest Blessing we can ever and will ever know (and it’s a darned sight better than Bovril... or Marmite for that matter).

We’ll all shut our eyes tonight and open them again tomorrow to a world full of fresh choices. Some of them will be fun, some inconsequential, some puzzling, some eventful, some life changing but for all of them one thing remains constant: we have to choose.

So, choose wisely my friends...