Choices

As the Christmas season has come and is quickly departing, I have been pondering all of the choices we have to make. There are millions of advertisements bombarding us everyday to buy this product or that. As we walk through the grocery isle we have options to buy several different brands of essentially the same product. We have literally hundreds of TV channels and radio stations vying for our attention. We even have a ton choices staring us in the face as we go to our very own closets every morning. Today, I even find myself bombarded with choices of men as they seemingly just pop up in my in-box. :)

As I was watching my niece yesterday make her own choice not to kiss her Grandpa good-bye, in her three year old mind she thinks if she doesn't give bye-bye hugs and kisses she won't have to leave, I thought about the choice we have to love God. God created us to have free will. He didn't create a bunch of robots to serve and worship Him. He created man with free will so that our worship would be true. Our love and adoration would be a choice. God wants authentic worshipers who choose to love and serve Him, just as my dad wanted my niece to choose to give him a hug and not be bribed or coerced to do so.

Sometimes I think it would have been way easier if God had never given us a choice. If he just laid out the exact plan of our life, said here it is, this is the way it is going to be, and we never had a chance to stray from it. But he doesn't, in His infinite wisdom and love He guides us but doesn't force us to choose Him. I don't get it, how God could know that we wouldn't make good choices, to know that we would purposefully betray Him, that we would say we love Him and in the same breath deny we even know Him, yet he would come to earth as a baby and lay down His own life just so that we could be with Him for eternity. I don't understand it but I am very grateful for it!

Everyday, I thank God that I have a choice to make. I can choose to live my life for myself or I can live my life for Him. What choice will you make today?