Choices
Diana Butler Bass tells a story of a conversation with an executive from a popular coffee chain and asking, after the various combinations, how many different choices were possible from the menu. The answer: eighty-two thousand! (You can see why the person in line in front of you may stumble a minute figuring out what they want.) She writes, “Americans , even those of modest means , exercise more choices in a single day than some of our ancestors did in a month or perhaps even a year.”Think for a moment about the wide array of choices you’ll face in the next year, from how you want your coffee to how you’ll handle obstacles and challenges. Some of those choices will be life-changing, and others may seem trivial—though it may be that the sum of a lot of seemingly trivial choices shifts our lives as well. I want to suggest two factors to consider as we dive into the next year and its staggering menu of choices.First, our skill in navigating those choices depends on our capacity for wisdom. Wisdom helps us perceive what’s at stake in our choices, helps us sort out the information we need to consider in order to make good decisions, and helps us think more broadly about the impact of our decisions. Wisdom is an important virtue, as it helps guide us so that our good intentions are converted into reality. Our desires to love our neighbors or to live truthfully are impotent without the wisdom to discern between what is or isn’t really true, or the wisdom to understand the impact our actions really will have on our neighbors. It’s one thing to have the desire to be good—but we also need to cultivate wisdom so that we may indeed enact actual goodness in the world.Second, before we dive back into the world of choices, let us remember that every other choices we make is subordinate to the first choice—our commitment to following Jesus. For those who have given our lives to the Lord, we have an orienting compass for the choices we face—we meet them with the commitment to see the Lord’s will be done. When it comes to some of those more challenging questions, that commitment may be just the key that helps us see clearly what must be done.