Pastor's Page for Dec. 31 2006: On Choices

There is a commercial on television that I really love.

It has women saying how they choose to live or die. One woman says she chooses to die while laughing. Another says she chooses to die of old age. Still another says she chooses to die while watching a sunset. But what they all say is that they REFUSE to die of breast cancer.

I love that commercial because it talks about the choices that all of us have. We seldom think of the choices we make, and how powerful they are, but we do have choices and the choices we have made in the past or even as close as today are impacting us as we sit here today.

We choose to have hurt feelings. We choose to be contentious. We choose to carry old baggage and we choose to listen to the old “tapes” of our lives which sap our joy and our strength. We choose to let setbacks dominate our thinking, instead of using setbacks to catapult us to another level. We choose to stay in bad relationships. We choose to not serve God and we choose to ignore God’s will.

When we make bad choices, we have to suffer the consequences, but the consequences from outside are almost never as devastating as the consequences on others or on our spirits. When we choose to stay in bad relationships, our self-esteem erodes. When we choose to listen to negative people, we begin to believe their negative hype. When we choose to walk around with hurt feelings, we make a wound deeper that could have been healed with a few rounds of intentional prayer and focus on God.

I was thinking about that this week as I watched the movie “Dreamgirls.” Jennifer Hudson, who plays Effie, could have chosen to be wounded and be set back by Simon Cowell’s opinion of her, but she didn’t. She chose to listen to the God in her and the rest is history. Nobody who has ever done anything of note in this life has been able to do that by making and basking in bad choices. Jennifer Hudson might have spent a few minutes spewing vitriolic words toward Simon, but then she “looked to the hills” and held onto the God in her which told her that her talent was given to her to use.

There are a lot of reasons we make the choices we do. I’m hoping that more and more people will make choices which make them hurt less and heal more. I’m hoping that this congregation will choose to look not at what we don’t have but at what we can have if we stay focused on God. I’m hoping that young people will choose to serve God and not just themselves; choosing only for oneself is a dead-end proposition.

When the women on that commercial say what they choose to do, they say it with a sense of joy and surety; when they say that they CHOOSE not to die of breast cancer, they say it with a type of conviction, tenacity and even arrogance. Every time I listen to it, I say, “How could a disease exist in such a spirit as that?” It couldn’t; that which is of God and from God pushes that which is not of God away. I’m hoping that we will do and seek what is God and what is from God … and in effect, push everything that is not God … far away.

God has brought us all this far for a reason. I choose to believe that we will honor Him for his having honored us.

Happy New Year!

Pastor Smith