Choices and Consequences

One of the heaviest burdens we carry in life is suffering the consequences of someone else’s choices. Suffering the consequences of our own choices is fair and just. But when our lives are upended by other people’s choices, there’s no fairness in that.

A drunk driver kills your mother.

A stray firework burns your house down.

A company restructures and your 25 year career ends in a single afternoon.

Your child overdoses on drugs.

Your spouse commits suicide.

Your parents get divorced.

Indeed, life often hands us pain we never asked for, created by choices we never made. And yet, in the midst of our heartache and suffering, it’s comforting to know that we aren’t powerless. We may not get to choose what happens to us, but we do get to choose what happens in us.

Instead of letting someone else’s choices define us and lock us in prisons of our own making, we can lean into God’s grace. And when we lean into God’s amazing and sufficient grace—slowly, imperfectly, one day at a time—the stronghold of bitterness will gradually lose its grip, and a different kind of strength will begin to emerge. As James Buckham Kennedy once said, “Every trial endured and weathered 'in the right spirit' makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.”

Until next time, dear friend, I pray your trials make you stronger, and that you find rest in God’s amazing grace.