Day 18: Choose Your Own Adventure
We all get to make choices. That’s part of what makes us human. Your choices may be restricted by your circumstances, but at the end of the day, you still get to choose. Not choosing is still a choice.
So why state the obvious?
When I made the choice to start this program geared towards instilling some discipline in my life, I didn’t quite know where this path would take me or whether I’d have the stick-to-it-tiveness to follow through with the program. I still don’t, but as we get closer and closer to the end of the third week, the momentum is carrying me more and more.
In the end though, I know that publicly sharing my story will make me be accountable if for nothing other than the sheer embarrassment that will come if I fall off and people start asking, “what happened to that blog thing you were doing,” with my only honest answer being: “I’m a quitter.”
Making that choice and any choice, by definition, leaves alternatives behind. I’ve chosen my Bible, praying, and writing over what for me was an unhealthy obsession with the news.
I’ve chosen habits that I hope and pray will make me a better man, friend, son, husband, and father and a more useful follower of Jesus.
Those are my choices, and I have to choose every day to get up and do them again. Make your own. Don’t ever let someone steal your choices, your volition by telling you that you ARE something based on an arbitrary category that they choose: race, gender, creed, age, whatever bullcrap classification that been chosen to separate you and divide you from other human beings.
It’s a power play: all of us bleed blood that’s red. Focus on the differences and you’ll have division; focus on what’s the same and we have a better shot at unity.
Choose your mindset, choose how you will take on the world, what lens you’ll view it through and don’t let someone else define it for you.
You. Get. To. Choose.
To illustrate, I’ll close with an illustration from a trial where my main point was to encourage the jury to think for themselves, rather than accepting canned talking points from the prosecutor. I wanted them to know that they got to choose, so I took this from wise man, who took it from a wise man, who took it from a… you get the picture:
There once was a wise old man and a young boy who wanted to show up the old man and embarrass him, make him seem foolish. So one day, this boy caught a bird in the forest, and he had a plan. He brought the bird, cupped between his hands, to the old man.
His plan was to say, “Old man, what do I have in my hands?” The old man would answer, “You have a bird, my son.” Then the boy would say, “Old man, is the bird alive or is it dead?” If the old man said the bird was dead, the boy would open his hands and the bird would fly away, fly away home to the forest. But if the old man said that the bird was alive, then the boy would crush the little bird, crush it, crush it until it was dead.
So the boy struts up to the man, bird cupped in his hands, and said “Old man what do I have in my hands?” The old man says back, “You have a bird, my son.” The boy smiles a wicked smile and says, “Old man, is the bird alive or is it dead?”
And the old man with sad eyes said, “The bird is in YOUR hands my son.” And so ladies and gentleman of the jury, the life of N.T. is in yours.
And so ladies and gentleman of this jury, your life is in your hands.
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Quote of the Day:
“[E]very time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state of the other.
~C.S. Lewis
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Links to Past Episodes/Resources:
Introduction Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7 Day 8 Day 9 Day 10
Day 11 Day 12 Day 13 Day 14 Day 15 Day 16 Day 17
Manfield’s Book of Manly Men: An Utterly Invigorating Guide to Being Your Most Masculine Self
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