#active choice

[theangelsnumbers]

You do not find a happy life. You make it.

Camilla Eyring Kimball

👉 Don’t scroll. Go to my bio, choose your link, and discover the message waiting for you.

[faithfulsheepdog]

Walk with God

Walking with God requires walking along paths of trust. The most direct route between point A and point B on your life-journey is the path of unwavering trust in God.

Easier said than done sometimes, I completely understand.

When our faith falters, we tend to pick a path that meanders and takes us well out of our original intended way. Sure, we’ll get to point B eventually if it is in God’s will, but we’ll be taking a detour. Time and energy will be spent on such a detour. (Though God can restore and redeem such things but that’s for another post.)

As soon as we realize we have wandered from our trust, we need to look back to God and declare we trust Him. Even if it’s only spoken as a whisper, turning back to Him and actively choosing to trust Him is one of the best things we can do.

Because the farther we roam from trusting God, the harder it will be to come back to trusting. The harder it will be to remember that God is with us and for us. Anxious thoughts branch off in all sorts of directions, taking us farther and farther away from the awareness of God’s presence in our lives.

Today and everyday day, let us actively choose to trust God. Let us voice our trust in Him frequently. Let us actively remind ourselves God is with us, God is for us, and God is worthy of our trust.

Those who know Your name will trust in You, for You, Lord, have never forsaken those who seek You. - Psalm 9:10

Show me Your ways, O Lord, teach me Your paths; guide me in Your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long. - Psalm 25:4-5

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight. - Proverbs 3:5-6

[dramoor]

“I think of my true self as who I am at the core, the hidden man of the heart, and the ego is a mask I wear in relating to people in the world. The ego is a false self. It wants to defend itself, promote its opinions as correct, fight for rights, etc. It is where evil resides and what causes division. I don’t want even a tiny part of it! I want to live from my heart/true self, not my ego. This means lowering my mask, dropping the shield, not obsessing with being ‘right,’ but living from love, letting Christ live through me. Christ cannot live when my ego is in place because the ego is proud, not humble. The ego is in direct opposition to the Lord. It is, literally, separation from God.

Our will decides which self to operate from, the true or the false self. It requires humility and love of God to put down the ego because the ego wants to preserve itself at all costs. This is the Kingdom of God, to live from the heart/true self. The ego cannot enter the Kingdom of God. It is a false construct of the fallen mind, which is what develops with every human born into this fallen world.  We are to love our true selves as individuals and each other individual person because we are made in the image of God. But our egos are all false, and made in the image of our own thinking. Christians are to crucify that self, not support it at all.

This is truly following Jesus.  He is Love incarnate, and denying the (false) self is allowing Christ to be Lord of your life.  Live from your true self, where He dwells. Make the choice to set down your ego where He does not live.   It’s like a parasite that has tricked you into thinking it’s really you because it is involved intimately with your thinking and actions. It is not from God, but is a creation of your own opinionated mind.”

~Nancy Kilpatrick

[incisiveredneck]

The long and short of this little debacle is that the UK is trying to offer more comprehensive internet filtering for children, but they're trying to call it Default-On instead of Active Choice. ISPs are fighting this because, for both liability reasons and straight practicality, no filtering system is perfect and they don't want parents to complacently believe that their children will be able to browse without their supervision and involvement. And this:

"It sounds like a good idea until you think it through," said one industry source. "There are three reasons why it doesn't work. First it may be illegal under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers. Then there's the fact that no filter is perfect, and finally kids are smart enough to find their way around them."

[pondering-life]

Those moments

Throughout ones life, a relatively small number of crucial choices are made, or seamingly random occurences happen, in which your life changes dramatically. For the better or worse. Such an episode can be almost anything, and doesn't even have to be something physical, but can even just be a change in the state of mind. It's not the most difficult task to look back at your life in retrospect and point out these crucial moments.

However, how can you determine at all if the moment you are in right now is one of those moments? How can you even surely say that it was one of those moments the day after? The week after? Month, year? This would probably depend on the moment itself, but some moments are vaguely lying in the shadows, in the gray area of cruciality.

An active choice would probably be a factor which could polarize the indifferences - or so it would seem. An active choice alone wouldn't be the sole force involved - in fact, it probably is one of the least influential entity in the lot. The seamingly random events seem to have a greater power in this respect, that you mostly cannot choose your own fate - your fate comes to you, through deterministic processes and how they affect you in a given moment. 

But even though our active choices affect these important points of our lives, it would seem that one have ability to manipulate how we want our environment to affect our lives. If there's a thing you would really want to happen, make the active choices towards this and stay open to environmental influences, you may have polarized the gray area after all. This could perhaps make your innermost feelings forced, and check the moment as one of those crucial ones, which it probably never should have.

It's beginning to make sense why so many choose to 'go with the flow'. Perhaps I should too. I'll try.