The Power of Choice

It has been a rough day.  Life is a funny, funny thing, you know.  The decisions made moment by moment are constantly at work shaping who we are to become, what we allow ourselves to believe, how we respond to what happens and what doesn’t happen.  If only we were mindful in those moments that everything is summed up as a matter of choice.  Endless, ever-present choices.  The one lesson we spend our entire childhood trying to understand and our entire adult life trying to avoid or deny.   Yep, even before the forbidden fruit, God granted us the gift of choice; it was just more complicated after that whole "biting incident" we figured we knew better than God.

I decided to stay up last night and try to finish my paper, and I got maybe forty-five minutes of sleep before work.  Early morning, and one Red Bull later, I was scheduled to cover an eight hour shift for one of my nanny families today, and cover child care for a women’s Bible study group.  So, it was in this sleep-deprived state of mind that I received a call from Preston after his ultrasound check up.  As his words came through the phone…“the radiologist is unsure”…“dense mass”… “need more tests”….I wanted to let myself go to that very human moment we all have in times like these.  The place where you start to feel stuck between “You’ve just got to be kidding me…I mean, really?  REALLY!?” and just being….numb.  Then, it hit me.  In that one little moment when the easiest thing to do is just cave and let myself lose it, I realized I have a choice.

I chose to stand on the side of faith.  Watch my confession.  Guard my heart.  Stay in peace.  Find a scripture to stand on:  Romans 15:13, “Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”  There’s a reason Paul called it “the good fight of faith.”  It’s much easier to allow yourself the excuse to just let your emotions take over, to let your fears have full reign over your thoughts, and to feel sorry for yourself.  It’s easy to accept the “excuse” of being human.  And yeah, not all moments are created equal, and it’s definitely not the goal to appear perfect or have it all together.  The choice is about believing in the greater good despite the circumstances, and believing in it hard enough and long enough to see it manifest eventually.  It’s about knowing that every moment you choose to stand strong despite what you see that it is producing the good that God has promised.  It just doesn’t come on human terms.  So, the choice is always ours.

It’s ironic really.  When we first heard the word “cancer” associated with Preston’s condition, I was working (for the same family actually) after a sleep deprived night prepping for a group project at school.  In that moment, it was too much.  I cried uncontrollably over the phone with my husband.  I cried because it was happening to us, and he had to go through it.  I cried because I knew that disease didn’t belong in his body.  Not my husband.  I cried because we had big decisions ahead, and I felt too small to make them.  As I was crying, I looked over, and a big pair of six-year-old eyes were looking straight into mine, wondering why I was crying. 

Now there’s life for you.  In a moment like that, looking into the sweet face of a little girl….so much hope searching for something good to believe in….so much compassion filled with wonder.  I have often looked into that same little face, her eyes full of big tear drops over life’s unfairness or little mishaps that seem to fill up her little world.  As an adult, when life is overwhelming and all you have in you is to cry, you should.  When it came to the big moment right before the power to raise the dead was manifested, Jesus wept.  And then, the decision was made.