[chocolate][strawberry][vanilla]

This is a season of decision.

One too many (or too few) college acceptance letters, a schedule so packed something needs to be eliminated, or just deciding where to spend the limited lunch money in your wallet. It's intimidating, and honestly, more crippling than most of us will admit to the people around us.

I'd like to venture a guess at the reason these decisions seem so daunting. Do I dare suggest that this is our human condition pronouncing itself in our inability to speak a language with more conjugations than our own?

You know that feeling of wrapping your brain around something? Almost literally feeling your mind kick off at a starting point and then come full circle and embrace an idea? I always got that feeling when I would visit somewhere historical. When you see the desk that [insert famous person] wrote [insert famous writing] at. At first, you sort of skim over the significance. But then, if you dig a little deeper and wrap your mind around the more concrete aspect of the desk before you, there's a feeling. This is the desk. There was a point in time when this desk was occupied by someone greater than me. There is more to this desk than the present.

That realization, that there is more than now, is the feeling I'm thinking of. When you are able to open your mind to the concept of an existence outside of you, outside of your time, outside of your limits. I cannot go back to when that desk was used. That's my human limitation. I can only shallowly ponder the concept.

There's another (among many, of course) human limitation, and it's the one I really wanted to write about. We all have one life. During that life, we get one try at things. For us there's always a path of reality and a path of retrospective hypotheticality.

That's why decisions, particularly the life changing ones, are so intimidating. Because every time I'm faced with option A or option B, I have to choose. Life doesn't allow me to see a preview of both, or go back and change my decision. Our brains are limited then, to understanding one option as the right, or the actual or the realized option. The others are just things we could have done, things we missed out on, things we avoided by God's grace.

Guess what.

God is bigger than that.

We claim we believe in a limitless, all-powerful God, yet we limit him so often to having "one plan". This is where the artsy and yummy sounding post title comes in.

God gives us lots of decisions. We obsess over picking the right, actual, realizable option. For us in our finite state, we have to. For God, any option can be the right option. He's all powerful after all. He gives us choices:

Chocolate.

Strawberry.

Vanilla.

We will spend countless hours, lose weeks of sleep, hinge our very happiness upon choosing the right flavor. But the thing about ice cream is, it's all pretty darn good. God gives us opportunities for a reason, and since he's big, he can use whatever we choose to whatever purpose he wants.

So dig in. Strawberry isn't "wrong". It's just an option. Vanilla won't kill you, but you might wish you had picked chocolate. Chocolate will make you happy, but it'd be better with peanuts. The worst thing you could do would be to avoid picking because you might miss out on two of the three. Then you end up missing all three.

The point is to pick. With an open heart, and with faith that God knows all and controls all. He provides opportunities, exits and wisdom. What he won't provide is an opportunity he can't control, or one that can't somehow be used for his glory.