I recently was faced with the dilemma of a bent car wheel. I am embarrassed to admit I kept saying, “I don’t know what to do” over and over like a mantra – to complete strangers! But after a couple of dead ends, now I know what to do. Free will – the power to decide things for ourselves – is one of God’s best gifts, even when we’d rather give it to someone else for a moment.

Yes, sometimes a lot of choices at once can be overwhelming. But most people agree that by not choosing something, we choose something else whether we acknowledge it or not. And I’ll grant you that sometimes we just have an illusion of choice. Mainstream news reports, for instance, all restrict certain issues or viewpoints, and many of them are owned by the same person or company anyway. So, no, an illusion doesn’t actually give us much of a choice. Another choice, of course, would be to not watch any of those news sources.

Unfortunately, we too often believe having a choice means we can choose between a good or bad, positive or negative, or helpful or unhelpful choice. You know as well as I, that is not always the case. Try telling the truth these days to someone you’d like to think is your friend. I didn’t have a choice isn’t really a true statement, though.

Sometimes we are presented with two bad – perhaps downright awful – choices, in fact. Yet, that doesn’t negate the choice. I’m thinking just now of the Biblical account of the choice Abraham was presented in whether to obey God and sacrifice his son, Isaac, to Him, or whether to give in to Satan’s temptations to reject the instructions due to the terrible difficulty of it. The Apocrypha shows us that Isaac was faced with the choice, too. And, as they both tell us, Abraham was blameless, even in this. So was Isaac. So was God, by the way, as you know in recalling the ram in the thicket sent there for another, last minute choice.

I wonder if Abraham Lincoln was named after the Abraham of the Bible? He face some pretty tough choices, himself. And he didn’t run from them. He made them.

Life doesn’t let us escape from choices; and those choices? They reveal something about us to others and to ourselves. And to God. So as we deliberate, let’s encourage each other to choose as well as we’re able even when faced with two hard choices. Liberty or death, for instance.

Account of Abraham: Genesis 22, Jasher 23; Image:pexels-johannes-havn-3218340.jpg; Patrick Henry Quote: “Give me liberty or give me death.”