On Choices

Any minute now, I’m expecting a text message.

One that’s filled with excitement, wonder, anticipation, relief, gratitude and maybe a tinge of anxiousness.

It’s a message that’s been months in the making…actually years in the making.

It’s a message that has brought true happiness and joy—even though I haven’t technically received it.

A message that is the evidence of good choices and eternal consequences.

Any minute now…




But yet.

It’s interesting to me

That not everyone feels this way.

These same choices taken out of context and divinely appointed order can produce a very different range of emotions.

Same choices at the beginning of the road,

Divergent consequences at the end.

Men and women are that they might choose. And they are that they might have joy.

But there are those who seek to take consequences into their own hands.

And thinking of the eternal implications of that leaves me with a pit in my stomach.

I understand that people want “freedom to choose.”

I do too.

But what they seemingly don’t understand is that once a choice is made, we will never be free from its consequences. Good or bad. Joyous or heart-wrenching. For better or worse, they are ours.

What they refuse to understand, or perhaps might not fully appreciate, is that ducking out of one consequence, will only bring another. And another. And another.

There will always be consequences to our choices.

Pretty simple, right?

But yet.

Too often people think they are battling for the freedom to choose. But their definition of choice turns on itself:  They had their choice. They made it.

They are battling for the freedom from consequences.

And there is none on this Earth who can give it.

Our agency is the only thing we truly own in this life. We must safeguard that as if it were a life or death situation. Because, all too often, it is.

Our choices begin long before the consequences ever start to set in.

I just wish more people would understand that.

____________________

Post Edit:

Oh boy.  Before anyone gets too excited about hidden meanings, let me just explicitly state that 1.) I am still waiting for that text message, and 2.) Yes, you're right.  It's about someone who is expecting a baby.  But, that someone is not me.  So sorry to disappoint--yet again!  (Although this time it was not on purpose.  I learned my lesson well...)