After the Story - Choices Like Rivers - Episode 36
After the Story - Choices Like Rivers - Episode 36
This podcast discusses each chapter of Choices Like Rivers and each episode is posted directly after the book episode. This corresponds to Chapter 13 Section 2.
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Now we have the answers we’ve been asking about Sharon and Will’s baby. No wonder she is so hardened. She has suffered a horrible tragedy and can’t seem to overcome, only survive.
That phrase, that God-given phrase regarding choices. That came as divine inspiration and when it did I gasp. That is how I saw my life and all my poor decisions.
Choices are like that. They are fast rushing rivers and we dive in, often without care or much consideration, and we are carried along at a feverish pace winding up where the river, the choice takes us. And often we are filled with regrets and heartache.
At that point all we can do is move forward from where that choice has landed us. I finally realized at some point that I had to make better decisions, better choices. However, I was ill equipped to do that.
I believe in my case I was always driven by a deep internal insecurity. Because of circumstances in my home I craved feeling loved. Whether I was as a child or not is not the question. I didn’t feel it and I continually found myself making choices that I thought would lead to love, but didn’t.
We are all often driven by our hearts, or a hole in our soul to some degree and not by the logic of our minds. Many of us know and understand this and that leads us to being overzealous when raising our children as I discussed in the last section.
We never felt that we got enough love and affirmation from our parents or others and so we never wanted our children to feel that way. We wanted them to know how much they were loved and so we overcompensated.
We cannot change how our imperfect parents raised us. We can only assess, recalculate, and move forward. You may need to seek out counseling of some sort, someone to talk it over with that is impartial and unbiased.
Sometimes just hearing ourselves talk gives us insight that we have been seeking. Sometimes we don’t need to hear yet more advice, but an ear to listen as we openly and verbally work it through.
But, we do need to make better decisions. This is hard. We are faced everyday all day long with crossroads of decisions.
We have financial decision, work decisions, relationship decisions. And when we add social media on top of all that we are overloaded.
I mentioned social media because I believe that adds more pressure than we realize. We feel pressure to post a perfect view into our world that is inaccurate and impossible to maintain.
Or we are angry and post a wild ranting tirade which will bring blowback in more ways than you can imagine at the time. Blowback with ripples that reach into every aspect of our lives.
So just how do we begin to make better decisions? This is what has helped me. It has changed my life. Not overnight, but little by little as I persistently and consistently applied it.
In the bible in James 1:19-20 it says:
19 Understand this, my beloved brothers and sisters. Let everyone be quick to hear [be a careful, thoughtful listener], slow to speak [a speaker of carefully chosen words and], slow to anger [patient, reflective, forgiving]; 20 for the [resentful, deep-seated] anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God [that standard of behavior which He requires from us].
I kept reminding myself to be slow to speak. Take a beat. Take a breath. Pause and let the initial knee-jerk reaction pass.
I learned to hear the entirety of what someone was saying and not just the first couple of words at which I immediately would begin forming my retort. Doing this often led me to hear that what they were really saying was not what I thought it was as all and relieved me of any desire to be angry.
There is a phrase I used to use all the time and I think it might apply here. I began asking myself, “Is this a hill I want to die on?” In other words, is this really important enough to blow into a bigger deal than it really is?
I am still learning. Sometimes I still have knee-jerk reactions, but I am getting better. I am making better decisions, and I am feeling much more peace in my life.
Give it a try today.
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