Choice

The one thing that makes us distinctly human, is also the thing that is our undoing.  Every other created being acts mainly on instinct but we human beings can choose what we do or don't do. Choice is an amazing thing. It makes us feel liberated. Slavery was built on a simple premise, remove choice and you control an entire race.


God could have chosen to create us with no choice. It certainly would have been much easier to deal with us, and perhaps the world wouldn't have been so screwed up. However, what kind of world would that be. We'd be walking around like a bunch of robots, doing exactly what we were programmed to do. When God was creating us, He was thinking like a lover. He loves us and He wants our love in return, but he wants us to choose to give it. Can you imagine being with someone who loves you simply because it's what they were told to do. Life would be pretty boring. The sense of excitement you feel when you're chosen would cease to exist. Love would become boring. I believe God foresaw all of that, that's why He gave us a choice.

Choice however, is a dangerous thing. Like I said earlier, it makes us feel liberated. The option is ours to love or not, to do right or wrong, to live or die. But with that liberation comes great responsibility. The current state of the world is testament to the fact that many humans have chosen wrongly. We could choose to love and share, instead we chose to fight for the earth's resources. We could choose to tolerate and embrace racial differences, instead to chose to enslave one another. Every day, humans make choices to do the wrong thing. We spend billions on all kinds of weapons whilst all over the planet, children are starving. Most tragically, we use our freedom of choice to hunt everywhere for a god or examples of one when the real God is standing right there in front of us waiting for our love. Choice.

A lot of us have made the right choice and have chosen to love the one true God, but that's where it starts and ends for some of us. We have chosen to be lukewarm there after, ignoring the mandate to be different, to show love and to spread the gospel. Instead, we choose to live our lives gathering worldly possessions and ignoring the plight of our neighbours and friends. We choose to walk past a teenager who desperately needs guidance. We choose to walk past our neighbour who desperately needs help feeding their children. In our minds we say that it's someone else's problem. So we continue on to church, to work, to school, to play, choosing to ignore the mandate given to us by our saviour, not recognizing the opportunities to be a blessing.

Today, let us to choose to love, to live and let live, to trust, to share and to live right. Just like a parent, God gave us choice expecting us to choose the right things, instead we broke his heart and chose everything else but Him.

Use your freedom to choose and choose wisely.

Joana James - Author of From Redemption to Maturity, Trusting God with your Future,   Nightmare at Emerald High & Alana and Alyssa's Secret & Finding Romeo