CHOICES

We always have the choice to serve God where we are, or to run and serve Him elsewhere--or not.

If we allow ourselves to be guided by God's love, we may choose to stand and fight. But sometimes circumstances overwhelm us, and like any great general we have to learn when to sound retreat. To sacrifice is not always to lose.

Sometimes we must sacrifice one thing in order to obtain something better. The good general surveys the ground and looks for a better place to defend or attack from, and so a retreat may actually be an advance in disguise.

Allowing batters to walk in baseball counts in the statistics against a pitcher, but an effective baseball manager sometimes orders his pitcher to deliberately walk one batter so that he will be facing a weaker hitter, and any decent pitcher will often ignore his "strikes to balls ratio" statistic and deliberately throw a ball rather than a strike, hoping to get the batter to "chase after it" and strike himself out.

If we choose to stand firm on our ground and "fight the good fight," perhaps even to our death, whether that death is a result of our fighting or simply the natural end of our physical life, we must believe that we are where God wants us to be, doing what God wants us to do. Only then can we draw on His strength.

To give up one's life may not involve the sacrifice of our physical bodies, as in a war or other violent confrontation. It may be simply giving up our own dreams and hopes and yielding to the needs of someone else. That someone may be an elderly parent, or a child, a husband, or a wife suffering sickness or disabilities. Or it may be someone else entirely, someone who was even formerly a stranger, but who is now our friend or beloved. People give up their lives to care for animals, as well, or for the greater good of a number of people they will never even meet, but who they hope will benefit from their research or their labor.

If we choose to run away entirely from a situation, we may discover that we have taken our problems with us or encounter a completely new set of problems previously undreamed of. And yet, we may still choose to serve God in our new life.

Sometimes we may find that we cannot physically run from a place, whether that is a hospital bed or a jail cell, but we can still choose to serve God or not in our place. The mind and the spirit are free even if the body is not.

The same is true if we retreat or move on to something we hope will be better. The choice is always ours. We are always free to choose to serve God. Or not.

APPLESAUCE
We've all heard the saying, "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade." The truth is that rarely does anyone hand them to us. We pick up most of those lemons ourselves, reaching for what we think are golden apples.

As children, all of us have dreams and preconceptions of what life will be like. Sooner or later in life, our dreams are shattered. We find out that the apples are not golden and that no one will hand them to us on a sterling silver platter, but that we must go out and gather our own apples off the ground.

On top of that they are rarely pretty like the ones in the produce aisle, but are small and hard and warty, and that the worms and squirrels have gotten there first.

We have to remember the old saying that the worms and squirrels always choose the sweetest apples, even as we pare and core those apples and cut away the worm holes and squirrel-chewed parts.

But if we do that and add sugar from our own store of happiness and a bit of spice out of our own creativity, whether cinnamon, nutmeg, or cloves--each of us has his own ideas, talents, and strengths--and if we stand patiently at the hot stove and stir, we can make wonderful applesauce. We can share that applesauce with others or use it to make cakes or just eat it plain and fresh, cold or warm, with a sprinkle of freshly ground nutmeg.

Or we can spend life chewing on wormy apples.

The choice is ours.

Choose happiness!

These last seven months or so have been a dark period in my life. If you have never been here, you cannot know, but if you have, then you can understand only too well. I looked back this morning in my journal to another dark period and this is what I found written there:

"What happens when you let the anger loose? When you turn on everyone and God and self? When you deny God and religion and the Bible and prayer and anything else you can find? You choke on the Communion wine. You deliberately stop and wander off the trail into the fogs and black mists. What happens when you flirt with evil and play fast and loose with the dark forces? What happens when you stand alone and feel free? Free to do wrong because your faith is shaken. Does Jesus really come after the lost sheep? I'm about to find out. I hope so.

"Is this it? Is this a cry for help? For attention? For love? I meant it when I said, 'He is never there for me.' Oh, I've had the dreams and felt His touch of love. I have been truly blessed. I have. I have seen His sign in the sun. I still believed in Him even when I was angry with Him. This is the first time that I've ever doubted His existence. I said it and then I realized it was true. Is this the Valley of the Shadow?"

What had happened back then was a huge turning point in my life. I quit my job, moved back home, lived a life of retirement sans pension, and entered into the best years of my life. God had great things planned for me, but He had to shake me loose from where and what I was. And it wasn't easy. Afterward I remembered previously telling Him that if He wanted me out of there, He was going to have to push me out. He did! And it was very painful.

Now, I don't know where the road leads. I just have to trust that He is still leading me as He led me back then, and that what He has planned for me is in His hands. I don't like what I see so far, but life is a succession of such things--phases, my mother calls them.

With that "I hope so" the light shines in. Dimly, but it shines.

An Ice Crystal
"And it came to pass" is one of my favorite verses. For everything does come at last to pass--the evil and the good. It gives us hope that bad things won't last forever and warns us that most good things are fragile and won't last forever either. So be kind to the gentle and gentle to the kind while you have them with you and do not fear the evil. Rest in the power and love of God.

None of us can know what the next year brings or even the next hour. Rushing into the future doesn't make the future better or worse, but only robs us of the beauty and promise of today. If we fail to live in the present, in each moment of the Now, we will end by not having lived at all. If your only goal today is to be able to cross it off the calendar tomorrow, what have you gained? What have you lost? You have gained nothing and lost the chance to truly live the moments and hours God has given to you.

If you suffer chronic pain or your spirit is in prison, then you may seek freedom. But freedom has always a price. All of us must suffer, whether we like it or not, for that is the way God made the world. He could have made a world without free will, but for whatever reason, He did not. And free will must include the ability to choose the better or the worse. How would we avoid danger in a painfree world? Remember that death, to God, is not an evil to be avoided, but a coming home, to Him.

Jesus may have sought to be free at last from the Cross, but if He had controlled His own destiny at that moment, He would have denied all who could not command the power of the Universe, and so He cried out, "My God, my God! Why hast Thou forsaken me?" and received only the same silence the Father imposes on all of us. If we weep, we must remember and know that He also wept. The only way to defeat evil is to endure it, to stare it down, and know that in the end the victory will always be ours if we celebrate it with God.

We can cancel our New Year's celebrations. We can stay home, go to bed early, skip the fancy meals and ignore everything except to put up new calendars. A new calendar year is meaningless in the vastness of Life. New life comes in springtime to the world of nature, not in the darkness of winter. Only as we decide to imbue the new year with new goals and resolutions, new hopes and dreams, can we make anything meaningful from a simple sunrise following a common night. One day is like any other except we endow it with significance and make it so.

Take down your Christmas lights and store away your decorations. Look forward, not back. Not just now, but every single day. Find something of beauty in each day. Smile. Reach into your heart and be kind, be gentle. Reach up and touch the hand of God.