'Any color - as long as it's black!' Weekly Reflection - 8th December 2024

I was in a local garage recently booking in my car for an MOT and Service. As I waited I was casting my eyes over an array of vehicles they had for sale posted on their notice board. A far cry from the Model T Ford which you could get in any colour as long it was black!  

How are you with choices?  I am not a huge fan of making choices in most cases.  I remember a nun who was asked about wearing her habit all the time.  She said, she liked it, it saved her having to think about what to wear every day.  When I was active in ministry I followed a similar pattern and when I was ‘on-duty’ I would nearly always wear something with Church Army on it.  (That also helped our children who got to know that if I wasn’t wearing CA clothing, then I was off duty.)  Retirement has been a challenge, and I confess to having arranged my T shirts into six piles, mixed colours, black, white and polo shirts. 

Each day is demarked, and I simply pick up the ‘shirt of the day’ and match it with other items. 

And it has been fascinating watching our grandchildren James and William be invited to make more and more choices, moving from when every choice was made for them.   

Making choices is something we do instinctively every moment of every day.  Some choices are almost trivial, and others have consequences that are far reaching.

At a junction on the Alaskan highway is a sign which reads ‘Choose your rut carefully, you will be in it for the next 50 miles’.

Or this choice, ‘Then the LORD God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it. And the LORD God commanded him, “You may eat freely from every tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.”

To enable me to get on with my day without over thinking about what I am going to wear I have developed a system. It’s not rigid, I don’t freak out if I swop things around occasionally. (I know for some people patterns like this are an absolute essential to enable them to function.)

If we were to stop and analyse every choice which we made we wouldn’t be able to function very well.  Therefore, we need to cultivate a system or a habit of making the best choices.  How do we line up what is the best choices?  Well, I would suggest that the ‘Golden Commandments’ would give us a good steer.

 ^‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

With this as a base line we can ask about the choices we make, is this life affirming, will it bring about flourishing and fruitfulness, will this choice help my neighbour (and we all know who our neighbour is!).

And the good news is that if we have made bad choices, even choices that are as bad as you can imagine, there is redemption, there is a way back, a fresh start and an opportunity for restoration.

I like to imagine Zacheus after his ‘repentance’ had several invitations to a meal from those whom he had robbed and cheated.  He had learned the value of making better choices.

Like a stone thrown in a pond, every choice we make ripples out and affects others.  And you know, that could be as simple at not smiling at someone or being grumpy.  When I ran Church Tent’s at County Shows I used to say to the volunteers, if it all gets too much and you feel tired and a maybe a bit grumpy, please take five, go for a walk, or go and sit in my caravan for a while.   

As much as lies within us as Jesus’s apprentices, let us endeavour to make the best possible choices we can. Choices that bring light and life, hope and joy.