Are you going to make fear choices or
faith choices today? Asking and then answering this
question will tell you who (or what) is driving your life
and can put and keep you on the road to successful living.
However, asking can only be done if you are aware that
you need to stay conscious about your choices, and
answering can only be done if you are willing to be
responsible for all of your choices.
Each of us is where we are in life because of every
choice we have ever made. Imagine wanting to drive from
California to Florida but somehow ending up in Canada. We
wonder what went wrong, and most of us look for who else
might be to blame because, surely, we wouldn’t have
gotten ourselves this far off track on purpose. Perhaps
the signs were unclear to us at the time, or we misread
the signs, or someone completely misdirected us, or we
just plain weren’t paying attention, but WE got
ourselves somewhere we didn’t want to be. Not that
there is anything wrong with lovely Canada, mind you,
this is just an analogy of how we blindly go through our
lives and then complain when we wake up (get conscious)
and find out we didn’t arrive where we planned to go.
This was an extremely painful pill for me to swallow. I
didn’t want to be to blame for how my life had gone
in a direction I never planned for myself. After all, my
parents divorced when I was only 12, my father
didn’t pay his alimony and child support to my
mother and we ended up on welfare, my father then married
an alcoholic and turned into one himself, my mother was
addicted to valium and was constantly in and out of
hospitals and spent the last ten years of her life, and
my early adulthood, in a convalescent home, and so it
went, ad infinitum! You get the picture. We spend so much
time focused on the poor hand we’re dealt, that we
never realize the solution is not in holding a good hand
but in learning to play a poor hand well—a growth
process which can reap even bigger benefits in the
end—resulting in completely turning our lives around.
Thanks to my belief in God’s love and my favorite
quotation—“In the midst of winter, I finally
learned that there was in me an invincible summer”
by Albert Camus, I managed to achieve a certain level of
outward success. However, I still wasn’t consistent
or where I wanted to be. Almost everything I’d done
was merely a pretty substitute for what I really wanted
but feared going for, because I’d been so
disappointed before, and now my health and finances were
not just floundering but sinking rapidly. Looking back, I
can see that even though I knew it intellectually at the
time, I still hadn’t quite gotten it fully in my
soul that it was I who, not just sometimes but every day
at every moment, had a choice to move whole-heartedly in
the direction I was always meant to go. I just
hadn’t been doing it.
Finally, one afternoon when I was reading up in the loft
of my town home, the realization that I had actually
chosen myself into the plummeting position I was in
rolled into the room like a heavy, black thunder cloud
and settled threateningly over the top of me, daring me
to notice it and get crystal clear about it or get
drenched again. I got clear about it. I realized I had
spent my entire life making fear choices, only they were
disguised as “smart financial choices” and
“smart career choices,” or they were excused as
“poor relationship choices” and “poor
judgment choices.” No more excuses. I was
responsible, and my life and happiness from that point
forward was 100% my responsibility. Surprisingly, instead
of feeling burdened further, I felt completely free for
the first time in my life.
At first, respecting your dreams as valid ones (for
example, not only doing the type of work you want to do
but using the method that you want to use to do it) may
feel like you are indulging some spoiled inner child, but
those judgments from your upbringing are precisely the
messages you need to rid yourself of on your path to
owning your choices.
It’s never too late to own your choices and follow
your dreams. Start off each morning of the rest of your
life asking yourself, “Are you going to make fear
choices or faith choices today?” and you will have a
very clear picture of where you are taking yourself.
Carrying out your life goals requires responsibility
taking. As you think about your goals, take a few minutes
to answer the following questions:
Who is in the driver’s seat of your life most of the
time, fear or faith?
During the times fear seems to take over, what are some
different ways you can choose faith? For example,
appreciating what you already have, learning how to let
go of worry, asking for help, and focusing on the
positive things in your life.
Finally, how will it change your life if you stay
conscious about your choices, consistently choose faith,
and end up getting where you want to go?
The choice is yours!
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