I came to life. After a full day of caregiving, attempting to understand and be understood, enduring frustration and anger, and occasionally laughing, I came to life. My husband, who has dementia, had gone to bed. I began to prepare for the next day’s writers’ group, which met on our somewhat chilly porch. The six of us have become a tight group, learning to trust each other in our writing and our lives. We meet, share, and enjoy being together. How wonderful.
I opened my laptop and looked for what I could prepare. I pulled up stories, poems, half-started pages, single sentences, and began to function again.
I don’t do a lot of Old Testament study—mostly Sunday school lessons, women’s Bible studies, and Christian novels based historically on Old Testament stories. Yet sometimes a phrase jumps out at me and becomes a part of my life from that time on.
“Choose life” was one of those phrases. I have been practically forced to look at how many choices we make daily that can lead to life or death: physical, spiritual, emotional. Do I choose resentment or forgiveness? Bitterness or compassion? Do I love or ignore? Do I make healthy choices in the carnal part of my life—food, drink, movement, sensuality? Or do I live for the moment? Do I pray for help or carry the burden on my own?
I know from conversing with many people that I am not alone in this struggle. This verse forces me to examine the choices I make, the good and the bad: This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.
If you don’t write, you might not understand half-started stories or single sentences. Yet I bet the Lord has blessed you with a gift that you hesitate to step out in and begin in faith.
When God gives us a gift, or a chore, or even a hint of what we should do, we should do it. If you want to feel alive even in the trials of life, then you must do what He says. The choice is yours. Choose life.
Susan Paulus is the mother of three adult daughters and grandmother to nine and has been married for over 60 years. She loves her part-time job at her small church in Northwest Ohio, is challenged by the two writers' groups she attends, and loves remembering she was led to the Lord in the mid 1970's by a woman who prayed, "Lord, use me."