Make Good Choices

If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.

John 15:10 (NRSV)

I don’t know about you, but some days I feel like I have to make too many decisions. I strongly prefer to be presented with a few good options. I prefer the sort of restaurant that has a menu printed on one sheet of paper with five curated choices vs the laminated diner menu with 20 pages of 24-hour breakfast, lunch, or dinner (plus specials!). It’s why I love Apple products, too, at least until recently.

See, when the iPhone came out, that was it: iPhone. Comes in black like a Model T. Done. Simple. Then a few years later, the iPhone 3GS was also available in white. OK. Easy enough, black or white. That held for a few more generations, then the 5S was available in black, white, and gold, plus there was a plastic model that came in a bunch of fun colors, too. Fine. The next year, the 6 came in two sizes – regular and plus.

If you go to the Apple Store now to upgrade your phone, what will you find? Four physical sizes – SE, mini, regular, or max as well as four different storage sizes. A total of, by my count, 14 different colors and, if you’d like to save money, all the models from the previous two years. You can pay anywhere from $399 to $1399 before tax, before warranties, and before cases, or anything else. How am I supposed to pick the right one? 

I’ve been thinking about all these large and small choices a lot as we are packing and preparing to move. What do we take with us to our next chapter, and what do we leave behind? 

There are always choices to be made in the move, as well. The church we are moving to asked us what colors we would like them to paint the parsonage, a very kind question (and one we thankfully had here, too). I picked up two fan decks, those things you see in the picture, containing what seem like thousands of close shades of every color imaginable. Based on what I’ve written already, you can likely predict that this is a sort of nightmare scenario for me. Sure, let’s go with beige, but what beige? What finish? How will I know I’ve chosen the right color? Can’t they just show me, like, 10 colors, and I choose the one I like best from that selection?

Jesus reminds his disciples that keeping his commandments is a path toward living fully in the life-giving love of God. Setting our primary value in life as loving God above all else and our neighbors as ourselves clears away much of the clutter that comes in trying to decide just what you and me are here for. We are here to love and be loved, to heal and to be healed, to give and to receive. 

The right ways to live out that value often introduce more complexity that we would like. People can be complicated. Life rarely proceeds in a simple, orderly fashion for any of us. Yet understanding that we can simply abide in God and invite others to do so, too, just might clear things up. It also leads us to a few simple questions of our own, first among them: is what I am about to do going to bring me/us closer to or farther from the goal of living fully in the love of God and sharing that love with others? No matter how many choices you have to make today, choose to trust the God who gave us this beautiful life in the first place. Whatever else happens, we can trust in that.

Keep the Faith,
Pastor Ben