Overwhelmed

My family recently brought me to a Brazilian steakhouse while we were visiting my grandmother in Denver, Colorado. Whether one eats meat or refrains, the amount of choices at this restaurant was absolutely incredible.

Structured to be more of a dining experience than a standard dinner, this restaurant seemed primarily to achieve

a) complete fulfillment of hunger for the customer (every dish was perpetually refilled, until earnest requests to stop were made), and

b) endless choices presented to the customer (waiters basically ran laps around the rooms, holding serving platters and tempting the customer with every morsel imaginable).

The only word that can describe this picture is overwhelming. Food surrounded me, accompanied by mouth-watering descriptions of each dish. No request went unnoticed; indeed, the waiters were practically omnipresent- they sensed that my mother or I was about to sit down, and pulled out and pushed in our chairs for us every single time. I never saw my water glass sink below half-full; within seconds another waiter would appear to replenish it.

As I sat eating and marveling at this perfectly oiled machine working before me, I realized that this restaurant is a lot like life. Every day we are faced with choices, both trivial and earth-shattering, that are pending. Should I expect this to come along, and prepare for it? Should I predict the consequences of choosing that? What will happen if I choose this? Will there be enough room if I do? How will this choice affect other people? Do I need to compensate for making this decision? Does this decision sadden or glorify God?

And yet, the Sunday-school lesson on choices is not my aim here. We all know that every choice we make matters, and that we need to be able to make the right choices or we will not go far in life. The new idea that dawned on me during this dinner is that of cooperation. My family had been to this restaurant before, and knew how to navigate successfully through the thick waters of choices. I learned when to save room for one dish and how to make the most of another. I learned that mint jelly actually is good on pork- in moderation. I learned how to politely persuade the attentive waiters that I would survive without another dish of polenta. All these lessons I could not have created and utilized on my own- I highly doubt I would have been able to develop even two of them on my own.

God wants us to learn the same lesson in our walk with Him. Heaven and earth know that we cannot make every right decision on our own, and in all honesty, we cannot make most right decisions on our own. It is through His help that we prosper and become people who “have it together.” This does not- and cannot- mean that we are never overwhelmed. On the contrary, taking God into account can sometimes overwhelm us even more in the short run. However, when we ask Him to help us make our choices, we accumulate strength and become shining examples to others. “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31) When God is for us- and thankfully for us, he always is- then we “become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which [we] shine like stars in the universe as [we] hold out the word of life…” (Philippians 2:15-16)

Let us do this together, and see what God has in store for us!