Good Choices

My grandson is rather loquacious.  Like all the kids in Lake Woebegone, he’s above average.  Way above.  This is his grandmother talking!  He’s three, but converses above expectations, which often makes me have to swallow a laugh.  Recently, as he was being reprimanded for trying something new but not sanctioned, whatever it was, he responded, “But Mommy, I just made a bad choice.”

Clearly, he had heard that language a lot and I was immediately glad my kids talk to their kids in those terms and teach them to make better choices.   So much of life is about making choices.  And the public examples of poor choices are legion these days.   The other day the principal of a school in Jacksonville, Florida made the decision to fire a teacher, who returned to the school later with a handgun and killed her.  How many bad choices in the life of that teacher led up to his tragic choice to end the life of another human being? 

In everything we do we have choices.  We don’t always make the best ones, but part of being a mature adult is to keep trying to make better ones.  Better ones consider other people and the impact of our choices on them.  They consider the common good.  God grant that there will come a time when good life choices, for ourselves and for the common good, cease to stand out because they’re so unusual.

The members of the community of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, SSJE, resident in Cambridge, Massachusetts, now offer a daily word for meditation.  “Brother, Give us a Word” can be found each day on the brothers’ website at http://ssje.org/word/ 

Recently the word was “choice” and the entry was this:

“The life which you, and we and Jesus chose at our baptisms is a life where day by day we must choose to love, and not to hate, to be friends and not enemies, to forgive and not to hold grudges, to heal and help and hold and not to injure, wound and scar. It is the choice to live such a life that eventually cost Jesus his own.”

Loving choices are not always what the world expects of us or encourages in us, but they are what the world needs.  Jesus lived that we might know a better way, a selfless way of being together.  It is sometimes a costly way to live but it’s also the way to fulfillment and joy.

Blessings,

Susan Russell+