If you’ve lived more than 20 minutes on earth, you’ve learned this one thing – life is hard. Work is hard, doing the right thing is hard, even planning the perfect vacation is hard.
Getting into the world requires a long, hard push through the birth canal, but that’s only the beginning. Have you ever watched a baby work to get control of their motor skills? It’s very sweet. They hold up their little arm and intensely concentrate on making it move accordingly to their will. It takes focus but they don’t give up until they master it. Then by exerting a lot of effort they start to raise their head and eventually roll over. After a few months they are up on their knees and crawling. Then one day they try walking, falling countless times before they finally get it right.
Yes, learning to walk is difficult, but is essential for us to get around in this world. Babies instinctively know they are supposed to walk on two feet and they press through until they get it.
We go to school where it takes years to master reading, math, language and science all the while most of the time as children we’d rather be doing something else. But our parents and society force us to go, to study and to learn because they know that being uneducated in today’s world would make for a very difficult life
As we grow into adulthood, we’re constantly having to learn new jobs and tasks. We’re continually being met with new challenges brought on by life situations and the different seasons of life.
Sometimes we make bad choices in the face of those challenges which compound our problems and other times we make good choices that improve our life. While Some things are totally out of our control, there is much we can control.
Here are just three hard choices that we can make that will greatly improve our life. They are hard, but so are their alternatives and the paths they lead us on are distinctively different.
Nutritional
We can choose to exercise and eat healthy foods or we can eat junk food and lead a sedative lifestyle.
Physical exercise is hard. We don’t always feel like doing it. If you haven’t exercised it in a while, it’s even more difficult to start. But do you know what is also hard? Not being able to climb a set of stairs or walk just one block with your grandchildren because your body isn’t fit enough. I see people who are way too young struggling to get around because they are over weight and out of shape. That’s a hard life, yet so preventable just by making the choice to move our bodies more and fuel it with the right food.
Addictions
I tried smoking when I was very young and like everyone else got addicted very quickly. Thankfully, the Lord moved on me very strongly that I needed to give that up. It was difficult- very difficult, but looking back, my life would be very different now had I not done that. I wouldn’t be married to the wonderful man I have been for the past 40 plus years, because he said he could not stand a women who smoked. I wouldn’t have been able to sing in the church choir that I did for 25 years that I loved doing and by now, if I was still alive, I’d possibly have emphysema, heart attack, lung cancer or a stoke. At the least I’d have wrinkled skin and that annoying smokers cough. That would be very hard- much harder than the three weeks of withdrawal from Nicotine I experienced years ago.
Getting off any kind of addiction is extremely difficult, but never impossible. Living a lower quality of life and being a slave to any addiction is much harder. If you’re addictive to anything, get whatever professional help you need today and ask the Lord to help you. He will. He doesn’t want us to be a slave in bondage to anything.
Financial
Telling yourself or your children “no” to things you want is no fun. It’s very hard to delay pleasure. But it’s also tough being broke all the time because all of your money is going to the bank in high interest payments. If you choose to say no to yourself now, and only buy things you can pay for with cash, there will come a time when you will be able to purchase more of the things you’d like to have. Don’t be envious of what other people have. Learn to manage what God has given you and you’ll get increasingly more to manage over time. There are great books and teachings out there to help you learn to do a budget, spend wisely, avoid debt and save for the future. You’ll still have to be willing to do the hard work, but the payoff is fantastic!
One great thing about making the good hard choices is that it gets easier the more you do it. You’ll eventually start to prefer wonderfully cooked vegetables over lots of fatty meats, sweet desserts and processed foods. Exercise becomes enjoyable and you actually look forward to that walk in the park. You’ll even get excited about doing your monthly budget because now you’ve given yourself a raise and you get to choose how to spend your money instead of everything just going to bills and interest payments.
Life is full of choices. God has given us all the free will to choose. Some are hard, some are easy and often times we aren’t even sure which choice to make. There is a cause and effect to each choice we make. Take the time to think those through and you’ll usually get it right.
Choose my instruction rather than silver. Knowledge rather than choice gold. Proverbs 8:10
What are some hard decisions you’ve had to make that turned out for the betterment of your life?
Duking Out Life 