Skip to main content

Life as a Choose Your Own Adventure Book

By
As a kid, I loved reading and re-reading Choose Your Own Adventure books to find the best possible outcome. Eaten by a shark? No problem. Return to page 65 and make a better choice. But there are no take-backs in real life. We are who we are in part because of the choices we made. 

Taking my kids around places I grew up reminds me of how my choices intersected with God’s sovereignty to give me the life I am so grateful for today. What if I had chosen a different school? Another major? What if I had dated other people or hadn’t dated the people I did? We make thousands of decisions every day, and some seemingly inconsequential choices can have rippling effects. 

I don’t often wonder about whether our kids should be growing up overseas. Someone once told us God’s will for us is God’s will for our young children, and that makes sense. But every so often I do find myself thinking about what their lives would look like on this side of the ocean. 

Like when we visit my primary school, surrounded by cornfields, and they never looked so happy running through green grass and breathing clean air. Or when my daughter catches sight of the little waterfall flowing through the village of Williamsville, where during college I devised an elaborate plan to own a stately house, and whispers, “Mommy! It’s so beautiful!” 





Choose Your Own Adventure: Second Generation. How are my choices impacting my children’s future lives? We could live in a great school district, surrounded by family who adore them. Some people would say that we should. But I am less interested in their surroundings than in their character, which is refined in submission to a greater plan than mine. Ultimately, I want them to learn to hear and obey God’s will for their lives: overseas, or wherever He leads them. 

As my grandpa used to say, we only go this way once. We make choices for keeps, and there’s no opportunity to skip around to an alternate ending. This shouldn’t discourage us. The Author and Finisher of our faith is writing a brilliant story with the intersection of billions of choices every day. We don’t know the outcomes, but we can trust the One who does.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Losing My Virtual Footprint and Physical Ticket

By
Thirty years ago, the technology that just turned my digital world upside down was unimaginable. I was locked out of my Google account because I foolishly left a Google voice number as a two-factor authentication. So when I was logged out of all devices unexpectedly, I couldn’t receive text messages to prove my identity.  The thought of trying to describe this situation to someone in the 90’s is comical. What is Google? Two-factor authentication? A digital world? Similarly, I can’t imagine explaining that despite having a ticket, I couldn’t board a plane that had a seat for me because a computer wouldn’t print my youngest child's boarding pass. In pursuing security and efficiency, have we lost common sense?  Technology has changed the world so quickly that I am old enough to remember a time when manual workarounds were commonplace and young enough to expect a lot more change will come in my lifetime. I spent much of yesterday trying every possible means of recovering ten years of e
Post a Comment
Read more

Making a List and Checking it Twice (Choose Joy)

By
  Some of the best advice I heard about moving is to focus on what is good about where you are. This is solid counsel, and applicable to both temporal and geographic contentment. The pandemic provides endless opportunities for discontent, particularly comparison to how things used to be. But perspective is powerful.   I could think about snow, which reminds me that Summer is by far my least favorite season (especially in pregnancy), we don’t have a yard/lawn/parks, and the kids have been stuck inside for months (and now can’t go three minutes without fighting). We can’t bake Christmas cookies because we made the difficult but correct decision not to have an oven in our 90 degree kitchen. Our kids miss soccer, gym class, running, and having friends. And if my thoughts go in that direction, my jaw tenses up and frustration mounts.  Or I could think about how we have everything we need and so many things we want. A huge fan blowing. Christmas music streaming on internet better than we oft
1 comment
Read more

Giving through Christian Health Service Corps

By
We are now Christian Health Service Corps missionaries. We’ve had people ask about the best ways to support us, which we will list below. Thank you for considering joining us on this mission!  If you have any questions we would love to hear from you. By Check Make payable to:              Christian Health Service Corps or CHSC Memo line:                             Project Number #176/Helm Mail to:                       Christian Health Service Corps PO Box 132 Fruitvale, TX 75127   Via Bill Pay Set up an automatic Bill Pay instruction through your bank/financial institution with donations mailed to the address above, giving your “ Project Number 176/Helm ” as the account number.   Via CHSC’s Website – for credit card donations Donate online at: _ https://www.healthservicecorps.org/author/helm/ (Please note when donating online that the Recurring Frequency default is monthly .   Use the drop down box to choose your preference.    Also, when donating online,
Post a Comment
Read more