Choosing Something from a Landscape Cluttered with Nothings

Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things; and give me life in your ways.

Psalm 119:37

I find myself living in the midst of superfluous options, like one who sits and eats from a box of chocolates. Chocolates that come packaged in a flat white cardboard box, lined in neat rows. A box once opened reveals a homogenous landscape of too sweet, too many. I am in the middle, surrounded by flimsy brown papers, reminiscent of a Shel Silverstein line drawing (complete with a slightly cynical but true rhyme) with my pigtails askew, cheeks and tummy puffy, holding a partial box of carrageenan filled chocolatey choices. Partaking fully in same empty sweetness.

Everyday I wake to a smorgasbord of choices. Availability is one click, one scroll, one like away. I live amidst a sea of temporal distractions that promise to delight me, numb me, trigger self-selected emotions, yet leave me unsatisfied, hungry for more.

Wanting more affirms that I am made for more.

Choosing what inevitably leaves me empty confirms choices exist that will fill me.

Spiritual hunger provides evidence there exists spiritual nourishment.

I have experienced the goodness of being fed by He who promises to prepare a table for me (Psalm 23:5). I have heard the voice of He who calls me by name and calls me His own (Isaiah 43:1). I have seen Him work in my favor (Romans 8:28), and I have been held by He who has engraved my name on palm of His hands (Isaiah 49:16). There is nothing sweeter, more-satisfying than tasting the goodness of God the Father through His Son Jesus Christ, not one thing.

Then why do I find myself choosing everything but Him, littering my landscape with scattered nothings?

Choosing Jesus Christ is an everyday gig. Everyday I choose to first reach for His truth, or to scroll through a feed of images and derived facts intended to provide a substitute story. Everyday I choose to speak to the all-powerful God of the universe or to air my complaints to others. Everyday I choose to be thankful or to pine for more. Everyday I choose to be confident in the Author of my story, or I choose to discredit His sovereign, good plan. Everyday I choose to persist or to quit. He permits me to choose every single day.

What if choosing Jesus does not entrap me but sets me free? – “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32)

What if choosing Jesus does not steal my identity but rather seals my identity? – “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of the darkness into His marvelous light.” (1 Peter 2:9)

What if choosing Jesus does not deprive me but brings me abundance? – “And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work.” (2 Corinthians 9:8)

What if choosing Jesus not only satisfies me, but enables me to nourish others? – “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he is it that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5)

I know the difference between choosing life and choosing nothing. I have lived the daily outcomes of each. I have tasted contentment that comes with abundance and the bitterness of regret that comes with depravity. Perhaps daily choosing is a daily gig of grace.

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And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them off, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters