It is a remarkable thing that some of the weightiest choices we make in our lives are undertaken with the lightest of reasoning.
We marry because we "like being with" so and so. "He makes me laugh." "We both enjoy running." And so on.
We bring children into the world, sometimes inadvertently but most times having chosen to do so. Maybe so we have someone to love. Or that someone will love us. At least that is the wager.
These choices bring unforeseen consequences into our world, and to the world at large. Typically they are wonderful consequences. We rolled the dice on love, or made a calculated wager, and we are surprised by how much it pushes us, makes us grow and dig deep, forms us into someone we would have never been otherwise. Or we are surprised by our capacity to love and sacrifice for children, never having known a love so great in our lives before they came into existence.
None of these choices--to love, to marry, to bring forth life--come with guarantees. There is no assurance of happiness or contentment, of being able to provide or having the kind of life you envision for yourself. The only guarantee is that you will die, and so will those you love. No one in the history of the human race has escaped this conundrum.
But were the "what ifs" to choke out our purview like a cloud of gnats and we defected on the chance to choose--to love, to marry, bring life into the world--that too would be a choice. What we believe to be non-choices are not defections, but choices in and of themselves. We may choose to decline a proposal, or put up barriers to keep life from breaking onto the scene, to control our destinies and keep hurts and possible betrayals at bay.
The choice to remain single when one could have married is a choice, one with consequences--sometimes positive, sometimes heavy with grief and regret. And then you get to a point when choosing an alternative is no longer a choice.
The choice to remain childless, choosing to not have children, is a choice, one that often prioritizes one's own life and autonomy. A couple may believe they do not have the resources to do so responsibly, that they do not owe a world in need of replacement with new humans anything beyond themselves. Or maybe they are just prioritizing their own wants before anything else, refusing to let them be compromised.
I think middle age brings the reality of the choices we make into focus. We choose, or fall into, one career at the expense of doing something else. By the time ten or fifteen years go by, one is more or less cemented into that path, and it becomes difficult (but not impossible) to change course.
Even the "sins of omission" are a failure to do something for the good, and are in themselves a choice with consequences. We fail to step in and help in a situation in which we could be of benefit, maybe out of cowardice or inconvenience, like the priest passing the injured Samaritan. Or we fail to speak up when we could have made our voice heard. Or we bury our talents in the yard.
God gives us freedom to choose as a great and risky gift. We can choose our own destruction or make choices to deify and join him, eventually, in the heavenly realm. Even when we choose wrongly, he forgives us and resets our path; we are not always destined to die eternally with the result of one wrong or bad choice. He can even use the consequences of those misguided choices to fortify us for the future, to teach us lessons we would otherwise not have learned.
And of course, love means nothing if it is not chosen, freely given. We choose to love God in our actions, not just our minds and hearts. We choose to get up and pray, rather than choosing to go back to bed. We choose to stop drinking, or to untangle ourselves from that toxic person, as a hard decision in the right direction. Choices take effort because of the consequences we have to then deal with. We reap from those harvests, eventually, the sum of good choices. But even the detritus of bad choices can fertilize the soil for a future harvest, provided we learn from it.
Having the opportunity to choose is also a privilege, one not everyone is afforded. A slave does not make choice. He is told what to do, what he can and can't do, where he can go and when he can sleep and what he must engage in. So even when we are afforded that "terrible freedom" Dostoevsky writes about, we should be grateful for it, because it makes us human, is part of the human condition--the freedom to make choices for ourselves.
I do thank God I am not the sum of my bad choices. Even when we have to accept the consequences of those actions, there is forgiveness, and forgiveness itself is a choice of Christ's. Just as he chose to pick up his cross and not eschew it, he chooses to forgive us; he does not withhold it when we ask for it. He does not condemn us forever, unless we are unrepentant. Because of those choices Christ made (and they were true choices made in human freedom), we have life. Because of the choices we make, we bring life into the world and perpetuate the human race.
