CHOICES!!!

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CHOICES!!!

5/14/09


ALL choices have consequences, whether it's positive or negative. Every aspect of our lives is affected by our choices, which can lead to either success or failure in whatever we get involved in. Neither success or failure happen overnight, the little choices that we make add up to it. I have often wondered if people know enough to make wise decisions when they make their choices. Every decision that you make is based on knowledge to some extent, whether it's right, wrong, or not enough.

Whatever criteria that you base your decision on, that decision will be born out of that knowledge and it will take you to a place. Just to keep it simple, I'll just focus on failure and negative consequences. Like I said earlier, failure is not an overnight thing, it's the inevitable result of an accumulation of errors in judgement and bad choices. Another way to put it, failure is errors in judgement repeated everyday, and they get repeated everyday because the person responsible for these choices doesn't think it matters.

On their own, the little things we do everyday don't seem to be all that important. A small oversight, a wrong decision, or a few wasted minutes normally won't have an instant or serious impact. More often than not, we escape from immediate consequences of our actions. One simple example I can use is smoking ;One pack of cigarettes probably won't kill you, but a pack a day for 30 years might. I'm quite sure most smokers realize that they are contributing to a future health problem, but the joy of the moment overshadows the consequences of the future. The pain and regret from these bad choices and errors in judgement have only been delayed for a future time. Consequences are seldom instant. Instead, they keep piling up until the inevitable day of reckoning comes and you have to pay the price for your bad choices.

The worst price to pay for bad choices is when you already know better and STILL make the mistake anyway. The worst part is not that you made the mistake, it's that you KNEW what would happen and you did it anyway. Then you ended up paying the price you KNEW you would have to pay for the mistake. It even says in the Bible that it's better to not know the truth than to know better and still do what you want to do, because your punishment for that would be TWICE as harsh. Foolish decisions are not only foolish, but they are also costly. Every foolish decision you make, you have to pay. Every foolish decision you make outside the Word of God will cost you some money. (ex: It might cost you to lose your temper. You end up in jail and miss 2 or 3 days of work, they decide to fire you for missing critical time at work.)

Failure's most dangerous attribute is it's subtlety. Since nothing happened to us and there are no instant consequences to get our attention, we go day to day, making the same mistakes, thinking the wrong thoughts, listening to the wrong voices and making the wrong choices. With better concentration and a better effort, we become more aware of our mistakes and more aware the each error in judgement reallyDOES matter.