Aloha...

"Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the 'right' notes and the 'wrong' ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another." -Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

"But Ruth replied, 'Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God will be my God." -Ruth 1:16

I was meeting up with a friend a few weeks ago who was really struggling with a big decision she'd made. She'd made the pros and cons list. She'd weighed the costs. And then she'd done what seemed best to her.

And she was filled with this second guessing that she'd made the wrong decision. Ever felt that way? You were sure you'd made the right decision, and mere hours or days later, it felt like a colossal mistake.

It's human nature to second-guess the big decisions we make, I think. Were we right? "If only I'd chosen the other route, it all would've worked out." Sometimes we're prone to imagine what might have happened if we'd gone the other way.

Robert Frost wrote a poem about this one time. I'm sure you know the one. It's about two roads that diverge in a wood, and a road less traveled that he took and made all the difference. He's right. It did make all the difference. But not because it was the road less traveled. It made all the difference because it was the road he chose.

It's easy to dream about what might have happened if we'd taken the other road. What if I'd dated/married someone else? What if I had or hadn't taken that job? What if I had gone to this or that school instead? And it's easy to see how much greener the grass is on that side of the road.

But it never is. It's simply different. Every choice we make comes with a certain set of consequences and repercussions. Every decision we make sets off a chain reaction of circumstances that never would have been set into motion without our "yes" or our "no." Our lives our an interconnected web of choices and relationships, both our own and others'.

And we'll never know what might've been. Because it didn't. Sure, we can imagine, but it would never be what we'd imagined. Because the choices we actually make never turn out the ways we expect them to. You know this. You start dating someone and the deeper you get to know them the more complex they become and the more complex you become. You take a job imagining how perfect it's going to be, only to discover the boss who's a micromanager or the policies that limit your creativity and freedom.

This is why I love the Hawaiian word aloha. What a beautiful word. Perhaps it's the most complicated and simple word we've got in our arsenal. It means both "hello" and "goodbye" at the same time. Ha! How silly is that? How do you know if you're coming or going?

But I think there's something profound about the idea that "hello" and "goodbye" always go together. Every time we say hello to something, we're also saying goodbye to something. For everything we choose, we're also not choosing something else. Every time we say yes to one thing, we're saying no to other things.

Last week I said aloha to Fort Worth. It was a place I loved, with people who loved me. It had become home and it was a special place in my heart. It wasn't what I'd expected to be, but saying yes to Texas was one of the greatest choices I've ever made. But it was time to say goodbye. God was calling to something new. And that was really hard.

But the great thing about aloha is that every time we shut a door on one thing, we're saying hello to a new thing. And leaving Fort Worth meant that I was getting to say hello to a new adventure in St. Louis. And after a week, it's nothing like I expected. But it's also exactly where I'm supposed to be.

We all carry regrets. And this may sound like a silly idea, but I'm growing more and more convinced that there is no such thing as the wrong decision. There are just decisions. There are the things we say "yes" to and the things we say "no" to. The question is simply: are we making the most of the choices we are making? Are we watering the grass of the choices we've made, rather than admiring the possibilities of others' green yards?

Because here's what I know to be true. There are no circumstances, good or bad, that are beyond God's purposes to use. God's grace can penetrate through the decisions that seem to cause the most harm and God's joy can celebrate and multiply the choices that bring the most life out of death.

But that can never happen until we are willing to claim the stories we have, not the ones we imagine we could've had. We'll never recognize God in the midst of our choices until we're willing to live into them instead of regretting them. We'll never see the willingness of God to dive into our stories until we're willing to accept that they are ours and that they have guided our circumstances.

So may we learn to accept the choices we've made. May we learn to see that the road we've taken was the right one, because it's the one we chose. There is no alternative. And may we learn to slowly let go of regrets and see our lives as the lived series of alohas we have walked through. May God grant us contentment with the lives we are leading so that we can see God's fingerprints more clearly in each step and choice that we make.

forever unfinished...