Choices….. Recently I had a Facebook friend post a photo of himself shortly after graduating from high school when he opted to join the armed forces. I laud him in choosing to serve our country. However, his take 40something years later was to compare his time in the military with his years as a boy scout. He considered it “a huge change from the Boy Scouts, where we had adult leadership.” The comments started to come in and the conversation almost immediately took a turn from time in the military to his years at a Christian college where he claimed the college drove him to start drinking in short order. That in turn generated the response “I learned to cuss at my good Christian university.”
I don’t waste my time getting into debates with anyone regarding their choosing what they put on their Facebook page. I firmly believe that your Facebook page is simply that, “yours.”
However, the rhetoric gave me pause. Almost immediately my thought was “why bash the military?” Why now after all these years have you not grown beyond the cynicism? Why now are you posting something that is going to cause dissention? Why now after all these years are you not looking at the positive side of those years spent serving our country. This individual did not see active wartime although they were part of the Vietnam era. They spent their duty in Germany at a desk job. Their time in Germany gave them opportunity to sightsee Europe during their off time, paid for, thank you very much, by the same government they are now knocking. They came back to enroll in college where the military paid for a substantial amount of the college education they are also criticizing. But I digress, as this post is about choices. Why did he choose to focus on the negative side of military as well as college life?
We all have a fork in the road in every instance in life. Which fork we choose leads us down the path to another fork where we, once again, get to choose. If we realize that we chose the wrong fork, we can back up, turn around, go left, or go right. We never get to the point of no return. Life isn’t always fair but we have opportunity to change what we do, how we react or respond for every circumstance. It may not be easy, but it is doable. At the helm of it all is how we think, what we’ve allowed to permeate our minds. I believe it is why the apostle Paul in Romans 12:2 admonishes us: “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.” (NLT)
I am so grateful after all the years of taking the wrong forks that I eventually came to the realization that I was going the wrong direction. From that point on it has been a learning process. Move forward, research, rethink, redo, back up, turn left, turn right, examine, rethink, move forward or stand! It’s all development and it’s all progression. And it’s all good!!
So today, may I encourage you? Look for the good in your day. Be expecting something extraordinary to happen. If you aren’t looking for good you won’t find any. However, look for the positive and it will begin showing up. Daily!!