Life is a Choice

Life is a choice. It is what you make of it. You can choose staying or leaving,  compassion or callousness, happiness or misery.

If your spouse is in the process of leaving, hearing that life is a choice may not be something he wants to hear or something that you want to hear either. It is easier to point fingers than change attitudes, easier to find fault in others than to look within oneself.

Adversity, challenge, cruelty, pain, disappointment, whatever you choose to call it, pain is part of life. No one who escapes these things completely and there are many who lead very difficult lives.

Yet, there are those who scowl through adversity and others who manage to smile through it. It is in how we deal with life’s pain makes all the difference.

Life Is A Choice. Will You Choose to Remain in Your Hurt?

While it may be difficult to be happy at present, the road to happiness is often determined by little, daily choices.

You can choose moment by moment whether to frown or to smile. Hostile or sorrow-filled faces are more difficult to approach than smiling ones. Scowls, either by choice or by unconscious effort, isolate the hurt individual and push away those who may want to help. Receiving little support in difficult times can lead to increased isolation which intensifies the severity of the situation.

Scowling may also keep one from experiencing endorphins and other physical benefits released from smiling. This leads to increased stress levels and reduced health again increasing mental pain, compounding the situation, and plummeting the negative individual into a self-fulfilling doomsday prophecy.

Choose to Smile Even When You Hurt

On the other hand, those who choose a sunnier demeanor, even when going through a difficult time, fare better overall. Smiling faces are judged to be more open, honest, and friendly, and studies show that smiling faces are also judged to be more beautiful than those with classically defined beauty.  Whether you are a natural optimist or not, your smiles have a positive effect on those receiving them.

Smiling therefore makes you more approachable and permits others who may want to help lift your spirits to do so. Smiling may help you receive a range of positive encounters from a friendly nod and return smile at the grocery store to financial help at Christmas (who wants to joyfully give to an angry or depressed person?). Such small encounters act naturally to lift the spirits of a hurting person and help encourage positive thinking.

Take a Look at Your Marriage.

Is your spouse about to leave or has he already left? How do you view marriage? Are you someone your spouse wants to come home to? Would you want to be greeted by you after a long day at work or with the children? Would you want to make love to someone wearing your expression?

If your marriage is in need of a lift, you have a choice. Look within yourself. Life is a choice you can change. One person can sometimes save a marriage by making changes and shining in darkness, but it is a choice you have to consciously make. There can be no moping. Make yourself appealing for your husband, for your children, for friends and family, but most of all make yourself appealing for yourself and for the Lord who still has plans for you. Do not give up.

While you may have some influence on another’s decisions, you have little control over their free will. Your spouse may choose not to come back to you. He may choose to continue seeing misery around him, but that is his life choice. It does not have to be yours.

Life is a Choice – Yours!

God knows your situation. He has given you little blessings that can be easily overlooked if you are drowning in sorrows. You cannot control others and should not try, but you can control how you live your life and how you view the beauty all around you.

Will you can choose to see or to ignore the good God has given each of us even in times of great despair? Or will you choose to find the good, the joys in life? Will you choose to discover what makes you shine and then reflect that brilliance?

Life is a choice. Choose to smile. Choose optimism. Choose to find good in others. Choose not to become a weight pulling others down. Choose to find the good in all situations.

In the words of M. Kathleen Casey, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”

Choose.

God Bless…