Choices

Turn my eyes from looking at vanities;

   give me life in your ways.

—Psalm 119:37

We make choices every day about a billion different things from what to have for breakfast to whether or not to blow off a meeting to determining if it is time to end a relationship. Daily choices run from the sublime to the profound to the ridiculous. Every choice, though, brings a subsequent set of consequences, the main one always being the choice not made. We turned left when we could have gone right. We ate tilapia when what we wanted was a cheeseburger. We chose to major in biology instead of music. We chose to remain with our childhood sweetheart instead waiting to see who else came along. What we chose brought with it a path for life; what we did not choose left those onramps unexplored. 

And we wonder…

We wonder if we made the right choice. We wonder what life might have been like had we chosen differently. We wonder if we were wise or foolish. We begin to catalog the consequences, drawing up a cost-benefit sheet for our lives. Are we happy? Are we content? Are we fulfilled? Is life meaningful? Have I fulfilled my promise?

The psalm reflects such pondering. The psalm verse is a simple prayer for guidance and wisdom. We do not want vain choices. We want life-giving choices. 

How do we insure the latter while avoiding the former?

The psalm directs us to a simple delineation—vanity versus God.

But what is vanity?

Qoholeth, the great philosopher who gave us Ecclesiastes, declares vanity ubiquitous. He sees most of life as vain. He sees history as an endlessly repeating cycle. He flatly declares that there is nothing new under the sun, just the eternal “same old.”

Admit it, we’ve all been there. Inevitably, there come times when life seems barren. We are in a dead end job. We are in a stale relationship. We are in the desert. The sun rises, but there is no excitement. It might be Christmas morning, but the old glow has gone dim. We don’t want to deal with it, but we may well be falling into depression. 

That experience is understanding vanity. Vanity is that which leads to emptiness. It is scarfing down 3000 calories of junk food—you may feel full, but there is no nourishment. It is following goals and objectives that the world may well define as success, but even as we collect all the toys, the only thing we truly feel is a gnawing sense of MORE. It is realizing, as Tyler Perry’s Madea noted—

You stick with someone meant to be seasonal as a lifelong love—some people are leaves, they take from the tree, they offer a    

        little shade, then the season changes and they dry out and fall away…

Things of God are otherwise.

God is life-giving, breathing freshness into every heart and soul. God is awakening, opening before us a stream of possibility. God is nourishing, feeding us heart, mind, and body continually, showing us enriching practices and experiences, ones where we live altered, but full—we become who we know God wishes us to be. In our summer Bible study, we have spent a couple of weeks with Mary, mother of Jesus. Her story told by Luke is nothing but a full revelation of this life-completing presence of God. She literally felt life quicken within her, touched by God. But beyond that, she experienced her life become more than she ever imagined it might be. She saw herself as more than she ever imagined being. She saw her worth multiply in her own eyes—she was a girl from Nazareth, but she was also the Handmaid of God. 

Luke tells her story because Luke sees within it a model for any life of faith, not just Mary’s miraculous encounter with God. Hence, we do Mary a horrible disservice by attempting to divinize her—she is not so holy as to be apart from all of us, but rather she is so human to be all of us. 

Think of that—we can experience all that she experienced in terms of finding fullness, wholeness, and worth as a person. It comes through seeing three vital lessons from Mary’s life—

HUMILITY

OBEDIENCE

SACRED ORDINARINESS

Mary’s humility is seen in her nearly constant state of bewilderment as she raises Jesus from birth to maturity. If we read through narrative of Luke 2 all the way to end, Mary is constantly left befuddled by the words of strangers about her son. As she holds him, she holds her real and actual child, but she knows she also holds God with us. She makes no attempt to rationalize that mystery, but rather simply accepts it as so. She has no need to control the situation by understanding it, but rather turns herself over completely to God, trusting God to be God as everything unfolds. Faith trusts God even when all God tells us and shows is beyond all reason.

Mary’s obedience is universal. She does what Joseph tells her needs to be done. She does what worldly powers set as the parameters of her life. And she hands herself over to God to be what God needs her to be. Our time and place gets itchy with such subservience. We see it as a denunciation of our being. Mary, though, sees it as righteousness. Her life is God’s. To experience the glory of life, she follows God, employing her life as God directs. That is the path to wonderment.

Mary is no superhero. She performs no miracles (other than bringing life into the world). Instead, she raises her son. She is his mother. Joseph, too, is much the same—he performs no miracles other than trusting a midnight angel. He raises a son, protecting him and his mother. He provides. Yet, that, in and of itself, is the stuff of miracle. Their utter ordinariness is sacramental. God is with them, God works through them, and God brings salvation to all the world through their simple existence. That offer is ours.

So, we face choices daily. We want to be sure we make good choices. We want to minimize the consequences of poor decisions. Here is the way—

HUMBLY LET GOD RULE

OBEY THE LORD

SERVE IN ALL WE SAY AND DO

There is no vanity in such a choice, only life, even life everlasting.