From Jerry Sittser and his book, “The Will of God as a Way of Life”:
Why Make the Game So Hard?
. . . . Past decisions set the stage for present options. We can excel at stupidity, if we want to. We can sleep late, lose our job, commit adultery, gamble away our life savings, neglect our children, and deceive those closest to us. . . . But we cannot alter the consequences of our choices. So why put ourselves in a bad position if we can avoid it? Why make the game harder than it really is?
Take a college student. He frets about choosing a future vocation. His preoccupation distracts him, so he neglects his studies and gets poor grades. At the end of his sophomore year he finally decides to pursue a career in medicine. But his grades are too low for him to get into medical school, which only adds to his worries.
Or take a husband who spends years driven by a desire for professional success. His wife and family pay the price. She complains but he makes excuses. Finally, she files for a separation, thinking it will give him a wake-up call. But her husband assumes it is too late to restore his marriage and devotes even more time to his job. Years later, of course, he regrets the decisions he made as he realizes the treasure he lost in his wife and his children.
As if playing a game of chess, these people made decisions that reconfigured the circumstances of their lives, each decision creating the context for subsequent decisions. Each bad choice put them into a more disadvantaged position, although never once were they completely devoid of good options. Their foolishness prevented them from seeing the possible moves they could still make. They failed, in other words, to take advantage, of the options still available. They never saw how they could do the will of God that was staring them in the face.
Making the Most of the Time
We could multiply these examples. God would be delighted to help people like them (and us!), not by delivering them from the consequences of their foolish decisions but by enabling them to endure and mature through them. Had they turned to God they would have found themselves in the center of his will and he would have given them grace to handle failure, divorce, loss of job, or the like. Although all we can see is our failures, God views our circumstances from a larger frame of reference and wants to accomplish some greater purpose in them, in spite of our bad choices. ~Jerry Sittser, The Will of God as a Way of Life (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2004) 148-150, continued . . . .
* Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
