Decisions, decisions

Why is it that facing the consequences of bad decisions always seems easier to accept if we approach the situation with the attitude, "But why me?"

Here's a few things I saw this week.

A car hidden away because the owner still needed it, but could no longer afford the payments. Women standing on street corners late at night along Whitner. The boat of a man of a man who drank himself to death ... in less than 3 months.

It struck me that none of these situations occurred accidentally. Nor did they suddenly develop overnight. In each case that person's predicament took time, years even, to finally develop and emerge ... and most likely, only after a long series of ill-advised personal decisions.

Ah come on, Joe. Sometimes things just happen that way.



Not every crisis has severe moral overtones nor does any one of us make perfect choices every time. But again, none of these scenarios happened overnight ... and I certainly doubt any of these people woke up one morning, smiled to his or herself, and then decided to intentionally choose a course that would cause them to self-destruct.

We face choices and make decisions every day ... like whether to invite a co-worker to church, who we'll associate with and call our friends, what TV shows, movies, books and entertainment we'll pump into our brains ... so often and so regularly they become routine and so seemingly benign that we make them spontaneously and without thinking ... forgetting to consider the long-term consequences of what seem to be quite minor, insignificant and unrelated actions.

Wouldn't decision-making be a lot easier if we could only see the potential consequences of our choices ahead of time?

Or maybe we already can ... it's just more fun, or glamorous or more exciting to ignore consequences and convince ourselves "That won't happen to me."

Which inevitably tricks us around the corner to discover "But why me?"