The lesson I taught the Beehives two weeks ago was called “Do the choices I make matter?” In preparation for the lesson, I started listing and writing about choices I’ve made that have mattered. I especially tried to focus on choices that seemed small at the time that ended up making a big difference in the course of my life or the state of my soul. I could have written for hours. Here are a few from my list:
Choosing to run for student body secretary when I was in high school. I lost. And it was so hard for me. But I learned to find a place for myself. I learned there were other places to serve and different ways to make a difference than the one I had imagined.
Choosing to believe in myself–probably in 8th or 9th grade? I can’t remember exactly when, but this was a distinct choice I made. I was (am still, in a way) very self-conscious and doubted myself. I was very aware of the things I wasn’t good at. My parents gave me How to win friends and influence people and another book. I can’t remember its title–something like Go for it–but it came with a stack of affirmation cards for the reader to read to themselves. I know, totally something from Saturday Night Live. But I read those cards aloud every night and as I did so, it made me think about what I believed about myself and what I based those beliefs on. I decided to believe that the things I read on the cards were true–that I really was a good listener and I really could make friends and I really was a person worth knowing and worth talking to.
Choosing to try to have children right after we got married. I didn’t want to have a baby right away. I wanted it to be just my husband and I for a little bit. But it felt wrong to me. I already had a master’s degree, I’d had some great jobs, I’d traveled a lot around the world. I had no excuses that seemed legitimate in our circumstances for postponing children. So we tried right away. And it took us a few years and a lot of tests and procedures before our oldest joined us and many more before our youngest 2 arrived. That small choice turned out to be huge–I’m not sure I would have the family I have now had we waited to try having children.
At the same time I was preparing to teach the Beehives about choices mattering, a high councilman from our stake called me up to see if I would interview a number of people, mainly older high priests, in the stake and write 5-minute life sketches of them to be read at the stake high priest group social. So I decided to ask the people I interviewed about choices that mattered in their lives. Some were “big” (marriage, choice of college, etc) and others “small,” like the woman who told me about the difficulty of her family’s move to Utah when she was in high school, leaving her lonely and friendless. Until she decided to look up. “I told myself that I would look up. That instead of looking at my feet as I walked through school, I would look in people’s eyes.” That decision changed her life that year.
I loved the answers I got in these interviews because they revealed to me, just as when I looked back over my own life, that Heavenly Father is in the details, that the choices we make matter to Him because we matter to Him. That knowledge gives me humility and confidence as I try to make conscientious choices in my daily life.
What choices have you made, big or small, that have mattered in particular in your life? What choices have shown you Heavenly Father’s love for you?
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