Pastor's corner - Feb. 11, 2010

The power to overcome

Many years ago the great preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick told of a teenage girl stricken with polio.

As he visited with her, she told him about a conversation she’d had with one of her friends, who told her, “Affliction does so color life.”

To which this courageous young girl agreed, but said that she would choose which color.

At her young age she had already discovered one of life’s great secrets: It’s not what happens to you that matters as much as what happens in you. For faith in God does not so much shield us from danger and death as it gives us the power to overcome it. (Lee Griess, Taking The Risk Out Of Dying, CSS Publishing Company)

Even Jesus had a choice. Not just about laying down his life, in that people were not taking it away, but because God did not force him to. He chose. “Your will, not mine be done.”

This is an example for us and how we live and what we do. We make choices. They are not always easy and sometimes there appears to be no good choice. Sometimes you hear someone say “I had no choice.”

Before we say that ourselves, take a good close look at the situation and all the things that led up to it. Sometimes it is true to say in a moment I have no choice, but that is usually because the time for choices is past and choices were made that led up to this point.

We do not always get to choose what happens to us because other people’s choices and sometimes simply life itself do things over which we have no control.

But we can choose how we face the situation. As the girl said, we can choose the color, even if we don’t get to choose the fact we must have a color in the first place.

We choose which shepherd we follow, or if we go off on our own. In that case, though, we are usually following someone or something. We can choose how to face the situations that happen to us.

Jesus teaches us how to make choices – even difficult ones – and that we must make choices in the end – to not make a choice is to choose, in the end. Sitting on the fence is not an option, it is only being wishy-washy. That does not mean we need to destroy or denigrate anyone else’s faith that might be different than ours; there is room in our world for many colors and many combinations of colors.

God will help us choose beautiful colors no matter how hard things are, if we only let him.

Rev. Jeannette Solimine,

United Church of Christ, Colfax