'Choice, Not Change'

A few weeks ago a thought appeared somewhere in my reading that ever since has been noted on my desktop awaiting comment. Jean Nidetch, a middle-aged woman battling with excessive body weight, was quoted as saying that "It's choice, not change, that determines your destiny."

The ongoing struggle that many have with excessive weight may not entirely be be due to bad choice, of course. Some evidently are more medically prone to overweight than others. But Charlie Shedd's book a generation or so ago witnesses to Nidetch's point, that more often than not "the fat is in your head."

In the larger framework of life, where exponential change is often blamed for almost every personal and societal ill, it is good to be reminded that the free will we have been given by our Creator renders us as responsible for our circumstance as any surrounding changes to which we may credit or blame it.

In no arena is that more true than in maintaining our relationships with one another as human beings--whether in family, at school, in church, in athletics, or on the job. One can choose not to be adversarial, even though change tempts one to be so. In fact, choosing thoughtfully for engagement in the midst of change may well be the best way to diminish its threatening power.

One mother learned that from her child some years ago when schools in Chicago were forced to integrate. Weeks, even months of trying to prepare her grade school child for the trama she saw coming proved unnecessary when, on questioning her little girl about how it had gone on the first day of integration she replied, entirely childlike, "Well, it was scary at first. The teacher set me across the aisle from a black girl. But it turned out great. We were both so scared that we held hands all day!"

The framing of our past with the present on the way to God's future will require us all to hold hands in the midst of exponential change, lest fear and pride rob us of our free will to choose what is right and best.