Life Choices Demand Our Attention
Every day of our lives there are choices to be made. Some are insignificant, some important and others are life changing. We need to exercise good judgment, to ensure that we are happy about the results of our choices, because every choice we make has an effect in our lives and possibly in the lives of others.
As parents and grandparents, we need to have significant input into the lives of our children and grandchildren, so they will have the capacity to make wise and deliberate choices in their lives, setting them up for success and happiness. Yes, bad things do happen in life that we have no control over, but very often we have the opportunity to make a choice and by doing so we can have a fairly predictable outcome.
So often we hear teenagers demanding to be treated as adults, yet the choices they make can be childish. We need to teach them that with the privilege of making their own decisions and choices, comes the responsibility to live with the consequences. It's important for them to understand that their choices can have far-reaching consequences.
INSIGNIFICANT CHOICES CAN BECOME SIGNIFICANT
Examples of this could be:
1. The choice to smoke one cigarette may cause you to cough and splutter, but the choice to continue smoking throughout your life may result in lung cancer or other life-threatening diseases.
2. The choice to eat starchy, sugary foods for a week probably will not do much harm, but eating quantities of those kinds of foods on a regular, ongoing basis, will cause health problems down the track.
3. The choice to sunbake all day in the heat of summer may cause painful sunburn, but doing this may very well result in skin cancer years later.
SOME CHOICES DETERMINE OUR QUALITY OF LIFE
There are many important choices we make in life which may increase or decrease our contentment and enjoyment of life, such as:
The choices we make regarding our possessions, eg. car, house, boat, pets, tools and household furnishings
Concerning our education, career choice, number of hours worked, what we do with our leisure time
Concerning our family, what time we spend together, where we go on holidays, which schools the children attend
These are all important choices we make that can affect our lives in various ways. We need maturity, commonsense (which isn't all that common), and real wisdom in making the important decisions of life, because some of those things will profoundly affect the quality of our lives.
THEN THERE ARE LIFE-CHANGING CHOICES
The kind of choices we would put in this category are things like:
Choosing your life partner
Choosing a business partner
Deciding to start a family
Deciding to relocate to another country and culture
Deciding to leave a regular job, and work from home on the internet
People who understand what life is about are more likely to make well-reasoned choices and decisions. However, unless we talk about these things with our children, they may not realise the importance of making wise choices. It's amazing how many people just drift along in life and 'let life happen to them', instead of taking charge of their lives in a proactive manner and shaping their own destiny.
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