Eden’s Garden

Today was a great day.  I had work from 9-5 and wasn’t expecting it to be a time where I learned and had some good conversations but it was.  I came home and went on a bike ride and then just hung out with Raissa and Kjirsten. 
Everyone winded down for bed and my mind came alive, I have always been able to relate to Joe March from Little Women when she says, “at night my mind came alive, with stories and characters dear to my heart”. 
I went out on my deck to process all the thoughts my mind was being bombarded with and began to somewhat place them in order.  I always look across to my neighbor when I’m on the deck.  She is old probable in her late 70’s.  Her husband died when I was about 7 and she spends every night sitting in the same spot reading.  As I was sitting there watching her the lights from the TV in my house were reflecting off the overhang of my deck and at certain times reminded me of a strobe light.  I compared how she spent her nights to how we spend our nights.  And somehow it got me thinking about how we have a choice. 
We do not choose to live, we are born. We do not choose the family we have or the way we look or the way things happen.  We do not choose death or for our bodies to not work right, or for our cars to break down.  There are many things that we have no way of choosing how they happen.  But we do however have a choice as to the kind of life we want to live, the kinds of people we want to be. 
More and more we are given more choices, and it leads us to forget this foundational choice.  Now we can choice the way we look, by the color of our hair, or the option of plastic surgery.  Thousands of years ago peple didn’t have the kind of choices that we do now. Even when we are children we didn’t have the choices that we do as we grow older and more independent, yet don’t children seem to live life so much fuller then we do. 
Maybe with all these choices that aren’t necessarily bad, we’ve gotten distracted from the choice that is most important the choice that we’ve always had and the first choice a human was given. 
And as I sat there I decided that I want to choose the kind of person I want to be and the life I want to lead, I do not want to stumble upon it and someday find that I am this person, and have no idea why.  I’m not saying the little choices don’t matter and there are many things out of our control but what if the little choices were made not to make us look a certain way by what we can do or not do, but to furthur us in a direction we knew we wanted to go. 
What if we saw every choice as one that either furthered us along on the way we wanted or kept us from going there and in some cases derailed us. 
I sometimes wonder God’s thoughts as he was planning out creation, as he thought of us and what he wanted us to be, robotic without minds or creative like him or  whatever else he was thinking.  And at some point he decided to give us a great gift, the gift of choice.  He simbolized it with a tree, and we had no say when he breathed life into us, but when we came alive, so choice entered our minds. 
So he breathes into us, puts a piece of himself in us, and then says “now choose, choose names for the animals rule govern live, and I have placed some of myself in you to help you choose what is right, but i don’t force you too, no, for you there is a choice.” 
Many things will happen that we don’t want to happen and things that maybe we do want, but its not whats out of control that happens to us that matters as much as it is what we do with the things that happen with the cards we’re delt …So we live now with choice, little choices like whether to watch TV or read, that when summed up and simplified come down to what kind of journey you want this life to be, a journey of timid traveling one of smooth paths leading in the same general direction as others or one of excitment challenge lots of falling and uneven paths but one unlike any other… this is, the choice.