Here is the transcript from this week’s Soul Care Minute. You can hear them at the podcast:  www.oilpress.podbean.com As we face the elections tomorrow, i felt this was appropriate to share, as it is on choice-the power and the consequence of this great human freedom!

Tomorrow we as individuals, and collectively as a nation will head to the polls to cast our vote for the candidates we feel best represent our own moral compass.  We will pause in the ballot boxes across the nation and will exercise choice.  We will practice a process that people in our history have died for, in order to gain the right of participation in. 

By definition according to Webster’s, election is:   a formal and organized process of electing or being elected, especially of members of a political body. However, it has a second meaning that I would like to highlight today:  The act or an instance of choosing.

Choice can be a terrible, wonderful thing.  Terrible in that we have all at one time or another experienced the paralyzing, ostracizing moment of being “un-chosen.”  From those agonizing lineups in school where the “captains” picked their teams and with each name called you stood there with your heart beating hoping you wouldn’t be the last one standing, to the day your friends, loves, or even children move on to other friends, lovers, or life leaving you reeling and momentarily dis-oriented.  Choice in our culture has become a multi- million dollar entertainer.   Thousands of viewers  tune in each week to reality T.V. anticipating from their own unique emotional experience with choice, who will survive to become spouse, dancer, apprentice, singer? 

Choice is also an amazing, liberating and wonderful gift.   Those lucid, grace filled moments that offer us the option to choose life, choose to love, and choose to pursue peace in chaotic situations where we have allowed destructive cycles to run rough shod over our soul.   Choice challenges us with questions.   Provokes a response when we are confronted with the option to despair, to quit, to give up hope?  Do you know dear listener, that you DO have options?  There is a way that leads to life,  that leads up out of the darkness you are in, there is room for you and space for your dreams in this world?  Lift up your head.  Look around you.  See the resources available to you.  Make a decision today, that you have value.  That you have purpose. That wholeness is possible, joy is possible, love is possible, laughter is possible, feeling….is possible.

A man who survived horrendous horrors in Nazi Germany concentration camps, Victor Frankl, credits the power of choice with his ability to handle the mental, and physical terror he experienced.  He says:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.  “ 

Another famous Doctor, Doctor Seuss put it this way:

You have brains in your head, and feet in your shoes, you can steer yourself in any direction you choose-

Doctor Seuss’s first book was rejected over 27 times. Feeling the sting of being “un-chosen” he made a decision to walk down Madison Avenue.  As he was heading home to burn his book  a chance encounter with an old friend, who had just become editor of children’s book at Vanguard publishing, happened resulting in the publishing of   “Mulberry Street” and the launching of  Dr. Seuss’s career. His career  would see over 600 million books published and translated into over 20 languages.  Dr. Seuss says of that day, that if he had chosen to walk down the other side of Madison Ave he would be in the dry cleaning business today.

Life is wonderful friend, waiting to surprise you with options that lead to success, satisfaction,  hope- look for them.   Care enough to believe you can make a difference-Don’t give up.

Thanks for the pause.  Thanks for taking a moment to reflect with me about the power of choice.  Exercise that great human freedom you have today, and choose to care. In the words of our good friend Dr. Seuss:  “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing’s going to get better, it’s not. “