A Thousand Little Decisions

Many months ago I sat in Relief Society as we talked about walking the right path.  How was it that we were all sitting there in Relief Society when people we'd grown up with and loved would not be sitting in a Relief Society that day?  

I have a slew of friends who have left the church.  It started when I was 14 or 15 with Sabrina.  I was shocked when she told me she didn't believe the church was true anymore.  Sabrina had had way more of a testimony than I did.  At 18, there was Tati.  Again, I was shocked.  Tati had made it to her first baptism anniversary.  She had been converted.  I had never had that.  I didn't understand how she could have felt the spirit and known the church was true and been baptized and then leave.  As I've gone through BYU and the years that have followed my time there, I have seen so many people leave.  And I don't judge them.  Because I've wanted to leave, too.  I know they have their reasons.  And a lot of them are good reasons.  It's just something that has always confused me:  why am I still here?  Maybe it's more like: how am I still here?  

How do we find ourselves in situations we never imagine ourselves to be in?  I think that's what the lesson was boiling down to.  And someone said maybe the most true things that I had ever heard and understood:  "It's thousands of little decisions."  If we find ourselves looking at someone we think is way ahead of us it could very easily come down to thousands of tiny decisions that we have both made or not made.  For example, maybe Rochelle has a better relationship with Heavenly Father than I do because every day she made the decision to have a morning prayer, whereas I made the decision not to.  That's not one decision.  In ten years that's 3,650 decisions.  

I used to not understand how we could make bad choices.  I thought that there was this gateway system with all of these checkpoints to stop.  For example, in order to make the choice to watch a rated R movie you have to first decide that you're going to watch the movie, then you have to (for example) get out of your bed, put your shoes on, grab your keys and your wallet, leave your house, lock the door, unlock your car, get in your car, start the car, drive to the Smith's, park the car, get out of the car, enter the store, get in line for the Redbox, search through all of the Redbox movies, add the movie to your cart, go through about 4 pages of "are you sures," pay, take the movie, retrace all of your steps and then find yourself back in your bed putting the movie into your laptop to start and watch it.  That alone has two dozen or so moments where you could stop and say, "no, I'm not going to watch this movie."  So if you were striving to not watch rated R movies there were so many decisions to be made between actually determining that you would watch the movie to watching it where you could turn around.  

I understand, now.  Because I think I just knowingly made five hundred bad decisions in the course of a few hours.  And I wonder if in a few months I'm going to look back at today and think, "there were so many times when you could have turned back and you didn't.  What were you thinking?"  

Guys, I was thinking that it had been six years since I'd last kissed someone.