"Two Choices"

To take the first question first, just what are the two choices eternity gives me? I see them as being ‘Do I believe in eternal life or do I not?’ I have to agree with Marcus Borg who says “So, is there an afterlife, and if so, what will it be like? I don’t have a clue.” [‘Speaking Christian]. The only way that I can be sure to live on is in those whose lives I have impacted for either good or bad 'to the third and fourth generation' during my lifetime.

What becomes important are the choices I have made out of the many choices that life has offered me. For the first part of my life I tried (and succeed to a large extent) to have it all: marriage, career, and a family. It was only once the family reached an age and stage of life where I was no longer needed 24/7 that I was able to make choices about finishing my university degree and resuming my teaching career [both of which had been put on hold for 20 years]. I was fortunate to be able to make the choice to work until my pension was sufficient, that augmenting my husband’s, it would provide a stress-free level of living for the remainder of my life. We made the choice to purchase a home with our son and daughter-in-law shortly after we both retired and have had the joy of watching two of our grandchildren grow up in the same house with us for the last 15 years.

But through all these years, most of the decision made were practical ones, ones that would enhance our style of living or our job opportunities. But of all these decisions, which are the ones that I now see as watershed decisions, decisions that will affect not only my life now, but the lives of others long after I am gone? Those are the decisions that really matter, the life-changing ones!

The first would have to be adopting our daughter which not only changed our world more than we ever imagined, but also changed hers and that of her brother. Second would be my decision to be part of the sponsoring committee for Vietnamese boat people. This decision was not only directly responsible for nearly 50 people coming to Canada, but was also a life-changing event for me. And then within the last decade I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to hone my skills leading a small group, skills which I am now using regularly.

As I look back on these choices, none of them gave me anything tangible, instead they all asked me to make sacrifices. But they all gave to me things that are really important, those things that only come when you focus on the needs of the other. When I think of our daughter, the refugees, that small group on Saturday morning as well as those whose lives I have touched since then in a myriad of ways, those have to have been the choices that mattered.

It is a little scary to think on these words of Wayne Dyers’s - ‘Our lives are a sum total of the choices we have made.’ How our lives play out is placed entirely in our control, controlled by all the decisions we make. So too is the legacy we leave for eternity, for the third and fourth generations.
What is your legacy?

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