surviving my choices...

...surviving my choices...

I hate making choices. They always seem to have a hidden side I didn't think about, something which leads to great moral angst, or a major elimination of possibilities.  Choices are tough for pretty much any creative, perfectionistic person like me, I think.

Just the other day, though, I had this thought:

Having choices to make means that I have a chance to move toward greater freedom and away from greater bondage.  

I'm not sure what to do about this thought, but I am thinking about it. I have stopped choosing diets, for example. I am currently shopping for the best maintenance plan so I can follow it into less weight and more health: la-la land!  Freedom from needing to diet! (It's only taken me a lifetime of dieting failure to achieve this level of backward planning--proof that one should never lose heart.)

I discovered these words years ago: "No discipline for the moment seems to be joyful, but sorrowful; but afterward, it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by it." I am trying to pause and ask myself before making choices, "Will the result of this choice lead me into more freedom, or more bondage?"
"Really, now," I wonder to myself. "Can chocolate before supper really be the answer to everything?"

How many times I have chosen poorly!  Then I spend a looooong time untangling knots on the cords that bind me--sometimes years, sometimes lifetimes. Some of those cords won't give way--maybe forever.  Like a shackle which grows into the skin of a prisoner, they have become part of me, part of my story.  Can I outlive the guilt? the sadness? the profound disappointment of a lifetime of mangled, tangled, poorly-chosen choices? Those kinds of thoughts are terminal if I luxuriate in them. They make me feel stuck. Powerless. Small. Not at all like the hero of my own story.

I must survive my choices, and I'd like to do so gracefully.

There are other, more powerful choices ahead of me that lead to freedom (gratitude, happiness, etc.).  I am working toward wanting the outcome of empowering choices more than I want the satisfaction of maneuvering around the past sour outcomes of previous poor choices, but I'm not there yet. (I'm still having an epic temper tantrum. I am sure that God is worried about this.) Sometimes I wish somebody would just  yank the reins away from me and make all of my decisions for me, demanding that I choose greater freedom. But instead,  it's my turn to grow up and leave the self-attended pity party I throw when I've messed up again. I firmly believe that that is why life spit me up on some pretty distant shores, like it did Jonah. I get a reality check, a panic attack, and a chance to choose to change my mind. My thinking at that moment goes like this: "I didn't ask for this..."or,"this is what I asked for why?"

In the tummy of the fish, Jonah must have had one of those reality checks, sort of an "aha" moment--that lasted for three days. He probably felt sort of desperate about that last choice he'd made.  It wasn't supposed to be like this, he was pretty sure. But when the fish spit him out, he was eager to choose what he had been designed and assigned to do, even though it had seemed pretty distasteful to him before. And I'm sure that every time he looked in the mirror at his bleached skin and hair, having been marinated in the gastric juices of a fish, he was reminded that some choices really don't lead a person anywhere where a person would like to be. I doubt that he ever chose quite the same in the future. "Just do the right thing," he might have told himself..."In the long run..."

Sounds a lot like my perpetual dieting thing. I always think that if I ever lose this weight this time, I'll never choose poorly again. Realistically, I probably will--in which case I always hope that the last choice I made is never going to be the last choice I get to make. (Although that's one possibility, I know.)