Deuteronomy 30:19
I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live:
CHOICE! What a terrifying word. A word filled with responsibility; consequence; cause and effect; success and failure; benefit and loss; cursing and blessing. Who, in their youth, would have ever thought that DECISION was the bases of Life and Death.
When we are young we made choices of all kinds; to eat, to play, to buck authority, to pick friends, to sleep or not to sleep, to do, to go, to be. However, most of those choices carried with them very little major consequence, in the grand scheme of things. And HARDLY were they ‘life and death’ decisions. Besides, all those matters were handled by our ‘adults’ for us. It was their ‘rules’ which we were restrained by; it was their ‘wishes’ we were commanded by; it was their ‘rod’ we were chastened by if we disagreed or went against THEM. The only real consequence was PARENTAL PUNISHMENT.
There were always ‘consequences’ of our decisions, however. Pick a wrong friend, and you get in trouble. Pick a wrong loved one to date, and you got your heart broke. Pick the wrong answers on tests, and you get treated poorly by teacher and parent. Decide to not follow instructions and you might get bruised, broken, cut, or damaged. RARELY were the decisions ever ‘life and death’; and we knew it.
It was one of the reasons we downplayed our parents. We thought they were overreacting. We thought they were heavy handed. We thought they were . . . well, not as wise as us who knew better. Couldn’t they see that these were NOT life and death matters? Adults! Always so over reactive, over protective, over sensitive and over the top! We just couldn’t wait until we were out from ‘under’ THEIR decisions. We just had to ‘become our own person’. Yep, we just knew we would do better; didn’t we. And then it happened! MANY MORE DECISIONS needed to be made! And no longer were they decisions about our heart or our ego only. They were about LONG TERM AFFECTS. Then the painfulness of cursings and blessings hit. Then sowing and reaping hit. Then scary awesomeness of life and death hit. The vastness of the effects of our choices hit. And it was not pleasant. And we became troubled. And we become afraid. And we became small all of a sudden. We ran. We hid.
Ok, not all of us. There were those individuals who seemed to just ‘become adults’ over night; thick skinned, heart closed, experience warn, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-dog-eat-dog-competitive-superior types — miserable souls, but seemingly death defying specialists. While they worked and conquered, we wept and withdrew.
Until the day we discovered the greatest decision of them all; the Master program of decision making; the master key for all decision locks; the one decision that makes all other decisions easy. We decided to say: “YES” — to THE ONE who makes PERFECT decisions: our new Uber-Adult, our King, our Rescuer, our Redeemer, our Friend, our Wisdom, our source of LIFE. Our weeping turned to joy! But what about the other’s ‘joy’, if they have not made the one decision that REALLY counts?
Original Copyright: © Anthony J. Massotti Th.M., Th.M. 5/09/2004