Small Choices, April 6

Wednesday, April 6

Matthew 22:39: And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

I don’t imagine that many people are going to argue that loving your neighbor as yourself is a bad idea, but it’s still something we don’t always execute on. When I think about this verse, my mind quickly goes to a big moment, a situation where I can either make a choice to love my neighbor and impact them in a profound way or I can choose to take a more comfortable, easy path and continue to let them suffer.

I really struggled trying to think of a time when I faced that big moment, a moment when I chose love and chose hope in a grand and life-changing way. Maybe there are some and they just don’t come to mind. Maybe I just haven’t had those ‘superhero of love’ moments. But as I reflected more, I thought that maybe it shouldn’t boil down to that one moment where choosing love and hope would lead to immediate peace and joy while not choosing love and hope would lead to conflict and distance from God. No. Maybe it is more about the small choices that are made every day, and hopefully, making more small choices out of love and hope than choices out of impulse and avoidance.

If I lose my temper with my child and react in anger, it’s not going to send her into a lifetime of therapy…hopefully. At the same time, if I pause and take the path of coaching and responding with love and kindness, it isn’t going to mean I am “parent of the year” either. Rather than thinking about trying to hit a homerun of love and hope, I pray that God guides me to choose these small moments…kind of reduce my strikeout to base hit ratio. Some of that starts with choosing to take care of myself. I am much better at loving my neighbor if I choose to do little, consistent things to love myself. Daily meditation and prayer practice. Exercise. All the little things we all know we should do to be our best selves. Then, when the moment comes to have a calm discussion with a difficult coworker, instead of a confrontation with that person, I am much better positioned to love that neighbor as myself and have an honest, caring conversation.

I do get it wrong… a lot… and I will continue to get it wrong, but life isn’t always going to give me those superhero moments where I get to choose love and hope in a way that is worthy of a Hollywood movie. God’s love can work through me as a supporting cast member as much as it can as the top-billed star.

Loving God, remind us that you are with us through all of our moments in life, big and small. Help us to understand that even though all of our choices aren’t always made in love, your perfect love is always with us and will work in us to challenge ourselves to choose love in all that we do.

Chad Anderson