Modern Day Samaritan Woman

Choices/ Consequences!!!

Cover up / Face the Music!!!

We face many choices in our lives. Thinking back, I can’t even recall all the many different choices I have had to make already. I do remember some of the profound life changing choices and their consequences. 

Some choices are easy to make, “Coffee or Tea”, other’s a little more complicated, and then there are the life changing choices. The only problem is we have no way of knowing what the outcome would be to these life changing choices and therefore a lot of prayer and thought have to go into them.

However, eventually we have to make a decision and hope that it was the best one to make.

 One of the key things I have learned is that there are ALWAYS consequences to choices made. Some are good consequences; but others are not. It is during the times of facing the consequences that are not so pleasant that hard life lessons are learned, that serve as a preventative measure the next time a choice has to be made.

Recently my daughter, 26 years of age, reminded me that I had forced her go back to face a restaurant manager, the day after she had stolen taken an extra balloon. She was very young at the time and although I wanted to cover it up, ignore the incident and protect her from her own crime, I also knew that she would have to learn a hard lesson. A quick lecture on stealing would not suffice.

I bought a packet of balloons and with my daughter in tow we returned to the restaurant to confess the “crime” and make amends. This experience was frightening for her; but she learned a valuable life lesson regarding taking something that was not given to her.

To date she has never even taken a pen or anything else that was not given directly to her.

This wasn’t a pleasant experience for her; but it was precisely in the unpleasantness and in the facing the consequences of her actions that she learned the valuable lesson.

Many times God will permit us to make wrong choices; and He will always save us despite these wrong choices when we ask Him to; but we will still have to face the consequences for wrong choices made.

My son aged 22 is house hunting for his first home away from home and confessed to me during a telephone call that there were just too many decisions to make. Some of the places he has applied to won’t even permit him to bring his cat with. That leaves him with the decision of having to either not apply for the property or give his beloved scat away. However, he understands that there will be consequences to face regardless of the choices he makes.

It’s something we can’t get away from and there is no short cut. For every decision made, consequences will follow and the one thing we should always consider is

“Am I prepared to live with the 

consequences of this decision?”

As a mother I also had to decide whether I would protect my children from all their mistakes and choices or whether I would help them to face the unpleasant and correct the things they had done. These times were never pleasant and there were always a lot of tears and in some cases embarrassment in confession involved; but ultimately they both learned that there are consequences to consider and that these consequences are not always pleasant.

Daily we face a myriad of choices and decisions will be made; but there is one choice, the ultimate choice that we should never ignore…and we have to choose very wisely because the consequences of making the wrong choice will be eternal consequences. We owe it to ourselves to consider out choice well.

We have the choice to:

Accept God’s wonderful gift of Grace freely given to us or to reject it.

Either CHOICE leads to a CONSEQUENCE.

An eternity in his presence or an eternity out of His presence.

John 3:16-18 “This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again. Anyone who trusts in him is acquitted; anyone who refuses to trust him has long since been under the death sentence without knowing it. And why? Because of that person’s failure to believe in the one-of-a-kind Son of God when introduced to him. 

(The Message) Emphasis my own

Choose wisely.

*Hugs* till next time.

Ariéte