Options

It's good to have options...or is it?

I get overwhelmed by the amount of options I have to choose from. It might be easier if the options were narrowed down to 2 or 3 (or even 15-20). But the options are almost limitless!

Take for example movies. There are thousands and thousands of movies out there. I can't keep up with all the ones I want to watch. I will never be able to see all the movies I want to see. So in the face of all these options I shut down and watch no movies. Or I should say I watch movies on the spur of the moment.

And when will it end with buying movies? Instead of renting a movie for 5 dollars I can buy it for 10. So I buy a lot of movies. But now I have all these movies, many I haven't even watched yet, and others that I'm not even sure I will watch again. That's why I stopped buying DVD's. Although I did buy one on Monday...

And the same is said for video games, books, online video clips, and music. Sooooo many options.


That's only one aspect of my life. What about all the other millions of options I have before me? Where to invest? What to wear? What to eat? Who to hang out with? Where to travel? What to do with my life?

I'm preaching this Sunday and it's sooooo hard to narrow things down, because there are so many options. Which direction do I head in? I could read and read and read for months and still not get everything there is to get from that one small passage of Scripture.

So how do I choose?


Kevin told me about the difference between living here and living in Madagascar. One thing that struck him was the shift and attitude towards options. Here we have too many options. We can't juggle them all. There, they have very little options. When they would go to the grocery store they couldn't choose which cereal they wanted to buy. They would show up and see, oh I guess we're eating Cheerios this week, because that's all they had.

And there mission had very little money or resources. So anything that they had they used to its fullest potential. Whenever they got something new they asked, "How can we use this to help people?" And they would find a use for it. Every dollar they had was stretched to help as many people as possible. Because they had no choice.

Here, we get something new and our first thought is ourselves. How will this benefit me? Our money is not used to its fullest. It is so abundant we spend on it whatever we want without much thought.


Inconvenience Store

I don't know what else to say, or where I'm going with this. I am just beginning to wrestle. I don't like having so many options. It shuts me down. But on the other hand, I like them because they keep me safe, and because I'm rich and healthy. It's easy to keep things the way they are. Hmm, I'll stop there...