Exercise the Freedom to Choose--Now!

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Sherman Potter was once heard to say in a M*A*S*H* episode, “If you’re not where you’re at, you’re nowhere.”

Then, in a more serious vein, Eckart Tolle’s 1999 book was titled “The Power of Now.” And also there are many times when the words of my own mentor, John Claypool, must get mixed into the brew. ““You can’t have it all,” he would tell us.

All of these quotes point to using our present moment to exercise the freedom to choose. We talk a lot in this country about that particular freedom, but what good is the freedom of choice when you’ve lost the ability to choose? We seem to say with Thoreau, “I am a citizen of the world first, and of this country only at a later and more convenient hour.”

The Corinthian church was doing something similar. But instead they were saying, “Yes, I am a member of this church, only at a later and more convenient hour.” The Corinthian church was St. Paul’s biggest problem. They would not use the gift of their “now,” their present moment to choose to be the church. They simply kept getting drunk at the Lord’s Table while having their orgies there.

Choice is as tragic as it is inevitably difficult. Sam Keen wrote, “There are so many lives I want to live, so many styles I would like to inhabit. In me sleeps Camus’ passion to lessen the suffering of the innocent, Hemingway’s drive to live and write with lucidity and the unheroic desire to see each day end with tranquility and a shared cup of tea. I am so many, yet I may be only one. I mourn for all the selves I kill when I decide to be a single person. I travel one path only by neglecting many.”

So many of us want others to tell us who we are and what we should do. We are so easily manipulated because we don't want the responsibility of choosing, and perhaps even more importantly, we want everybody to like us, so we just don't make authentic choices or claim authentic responsibility for ourselves. It's just too doggoned difficult.

There's a big price tag for such passive dependency, though. Pretty soon, we find ourselves acting out the desires of others – and even becoming the desires of others – and those others are there, believe me. They will be glad to do our thinking as well as to tell us what to do and whom to be. Why? Because they are using the power of their “now” to get what they want.

We can’t even seem to choose regarding our own bodies and attitudes. In the somewhat chirpy optimism of a copy of Readers Digest several months ago in a waiting room, I found these four articles: “How to Stay Slim Forever;” “Five Ways to Stop Feeling Tired;” “How to Get Your Way” and “What It Takes to Be Successful.”

Clearly, I thought, the editors of Readers Digest have concluded that their millions of readers are fat, lazy, frustrated and unsuccessful. Perhaps they were right. We just can’t seem to use our moments to make creative choices that involve the spiritual.

In some sense we are Corinthians. Yes, I am a member of this church, only at a later and more convenient hour.

St. Paul’s frustration is clear. “Listen,” he says, “Now is the time. Now is the acceptable time to choose your healing.” (II Corinthians 6)

What he is really saying is that the church is tired of telling you what you are doing to harm it. Make a choice and make it now. There is nothing standing in your way.

It doesn’t take a lot to choose to be the church. We are capable of making creative choices. When? “Now is the acceptable time.” says St. Paul to a church that could not choose to be the church. So I ask you: What better time than now?