Choosing and Chasing

When I first read this post by Bradley Moore, I couldn't help identifying with his middle school tale of self-reinvention (the eighth grade wasn't particularly kind to me), and I started thinking about the tension we live in between the lives that are given to us and our own ability to determine our selves.

It's a pretty live question for me how much possibility for self-determination really exists. I tend to think it's different for different people. You didn't get to choose all your circumstances, and some of those have an extremely powerful influence on the person you are and will continue to be. Even becoming fully aware of all the things that influence who we've become can be tough—rewriting ourselves in the midst of that can be even tougher.

But you have to try.

You have to fight for the possibility that you can grow, change, and struggle to become someone else. Sometimes you have to restructure some of the things in your life, enlist help from other people and God, and just dig into the struggle to become the person you discern God called you to be. Because while I don't think we have absolute power over our own self-determination, the minute we give in and just accept ourselves as accidents of fate, the moment we accept the way we are as the way we have to be, we get stuck. We stop growing. And the minute any living thing stops growing, it starts dying.

There’s a famous Lombardi quote from when he arrived to coach the Packers: "Gentlemen, we are going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because nothing is perfect. But we are going to relentlessly chase it, because in the process we will catch excellence." That's really the way it is: You have to be willing to chase some things that ultimately might be out of your grasp, because we humans are at our best when we're chasing something. But we don't have to chase anything, and there are infinite choices about what we're going to pursue.That's why intentionality, the practice of making distinct choices about who we want to become and what we want to do, is so important.

You don't get to make all the choices, but the ones you do get to make matter. They really, really, matter.