Loving Life

Deut. 30:19-20 - “Today I have given you the choice between life and death, between blessings and curses. Now I call on heaven and earth to witness the choice you make. Oh, that you would choose life, so that you and your descendants might live!  You can make this choice by loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and committing yourself firmly to him. This is the key to your life. And if you love and obey the Lord, you will live long in the land the Lord swore to give your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

 

This passage is obviously about loving God, but I think it is also about more than just that.  I think it is about the choice to love the life God has given us.  I often find myself criticizing the life God has given me.   I want to live in a place with a cooler climate (I love you all, but I don’t love this humidity!)  I want to spend less time making car repairs. I want to be 100 pounds lighter.  There is nothing inherently wrong with these wants UNTIL they cause me to lose gratitude and love for the life I have.  The more I focus on what I don’t have, the more I LEARN to focus on what I don’t have.  When I live that way, I am also influencing others to live that way.  This is the tragic way toward death. 

This is the choice “between blessings and curses.”  Hence the Lord’s pleading to “choose life.” It is a choice we are invited to make every day.  Love the life I’ve been given – the family, the friends, the work, the opportunities, the beauty around me, and even the things I’ve been given.  I can always find something wrong with all of those things, but finding fault is not the way of life and blessing.  I am going to work hard on choosing life more than I do now.

 

Question:  Are there attitude adjustments you can make towards loving the life you have more?

 

Prayer:  God of life and blessing.  You invite us to choose life which seems so obvious.  But the choice is often hard to live out.  Help us see one place today where we can move from curses to blessings. Amen

 

Prayer Focus:  Pray for all families who are struggling with being separated right now.

 

Song:  CHOOSE LIFE (Big Tent Revival)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX4fC4WFCIU

The Sacred “Pause Button”

Deuteronomy 30:19-20a, CEB -  I call heaven and earth as my witnesses against you right now: I have set life and death, blessing and curse before you. Now choose life—so that you and your descendants will live—by loving the Lord your God, by obeying his voice, and by clinging to him.

 

“Between Stimulus and Response There Is a Space. In That Space Is Our Power To Choose Our Response”                                  Stephen Covey, quoting an unknown author

 

                When I was a teenager, the primary way to listen to audio recordings (music, lectures, etc) was cassette tape.  I actually still have a cassette player and several cassettes.  Over the years, I had several players and one of the common problems I had with them is that eventually, the “pause” button would break.  Sometimes, I think we have the same challenge with our actions.  Our pause button is either broken or we are not even aware that we have the ability to pause before reacting to a situation. 

Stephen Covey, in his many writings, made the above quote popular, though he claimed that he did not author the wisdom.  In any case, it is a fact.  Whatever happens to us, we have a choice as to how we act in response.  I have caught myself using the phrase, “it was just an automatic reaction,” when trying to justify the way I acted.  The reality is that I made a choice to act though it was a unaware choice. 

The remedy for this is (re)discovering our “pause” button.  When we are “triggered,” by something someone does, we can push pause, by taking a long intention breath.  This gives us some space to consider how we will act (or not act as the case may be) as we respond to the stimulus.  This is where the scripture above comes into play.  We can choose blessings or curses.  We can choose in alignment with the values we have learned from our faith and wisdom traditions.  We can take a moment to remember our connection to God’s Spirit and allow ourselves to be guided by divine image placed in us by God. 

This has implications for the forgiveness process.  Hurts that we have experienced in the past tend to replay in our mind every time we remember the offense.  We relive the hurt as we “replay the tape” in our head once again.  The forgiveness process calls for pushing “pause” on these old recordings and thus, creating the space to make a more life-giving choice.  Acting in life-affirming ways towards those who have hurt us begins to erase those old tapes over time.  We most likely will always remember the offense, but the event will lose it’s power to trigger us.  We become more and more free.

 

Question:  Are there some old but familiar recordings that you need to “push pause” on in order to create space for a new response?

 

Prayer:  God, thank you for the gift of choice.  Keep this gift ever before us in the moments/spaces where we choose between blessings and curses.  Help us discern and act in alignment with the divine image You have placed within us.  Amen.

 

Prayer Focus:  Pray for school-age children and school personnel who are finishing up another school year in the shadow of yet another mass school shooting.

 

Song:  Choose Life – Big Tent Revival

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX4fC4WFCIU