Starting with the preamble of a previous post . . . (the preamble of the same theme), Jerry Sittser writes:
My children want the freedom to make choices. When I take them to the local mall for a shopping expedition, they always notice with glee the new stores that have opened since we were there. New stores mean more choices, and more choices, they assume, are a good thing.
My children are not unusual. Most middle-class adolescence in our culture angle to get as much freedom of choice as they can—to spend as much time and money at the mall, to surf the internet hour after hour, to view whatever new movie on the marquee of the local multiplex, to attend every dance, party, and game they can. But is this quest for freedom altogether healthy? Like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, it can beguile us into over looking the dangers involved in the face of too many choices.
Two hundred + years ago the Founding Fathers of the United States of America decided to gamble on freedom. At the time, however, the American people had few opportunities to express that freedom because they lived in a simple society offering limited choices and requiring hard work to survive. We live in a different world today. The market economy and the technological revolution have changed all that. We all have freedom to make almost unlimited choices.
I see the impact on teenagers in particular. The number and range of choices they have overwhelm and confuse them.They wander through life as if in a constant state of vertigo because of so may options. It is not, however, a problem unique to teenagers. All of us feel immobilized at times by the choices we have to make. Freedom appears as much an enemy as it is a friend. However much we cherish it, we feel cursed by it too. What good are all those choices if we fail to choose what is good and right and true? ~Jerry Sittser, The Will of God as a Way of Life (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2000, 2004), 55-56
The above post is a preamble to what follows (a previous post of December 19, 2020) ‘The Will of God as a Way of Life’.
