I listened to this song called “Stop The Wedding!” by Ashe, and it’s such an empowering song. It liberates you. All of the comments were like, choose yourself, pick your life, and it just fills you with so much power when you say that, right?
Choose yourself. You remember that you have a choice. That you don’t have to keep going down a path just because you’ve already started going down it.
So many times we think that we have one option,
which is to keep going. But you can either go down the path you’ve been going and keep going down it, or you can turn back and go down a different path. The issue with going down a different path is that now you have to turn around, and there’s a lot of intrinsic labor that goes into starting over. It feels like you’ve made no progress.
The price you pay for starting over is the imagined benefit of progress.
You think that because you’re starting over, you’re not going to get where you want to go, and you’ve wasted all this time. But if you’re going down a path that wouldn’t take you where you would ultimately find your own fulfillment, or find your own joy, then was it ever really progress? Were you ever really going anywhere, or were you just delaying the inevitable?
Turning around can actually take you far ahead of where you would have gone if you’d kept going. But first you have to let go of the idea that continuing is the same thing as progressing.
So I’m listening to this song, and everyone is saying choose yourself, and I understand it.
But I introduce to you the concept of choosing yourself being a picture of going down the wrong path.
Because when you don’t have an accurate picture of who you’re choosing when you say choose yourself, you’ll end up choosing who you think you are.
And then once you choose her, she starts making decisions. Because when you choose someone, let’s define what that is, right? You give them preeminence in your life. You give them a front seat. You let them drive your life. If I choose to be healthy today, the healthy version of me is going to drive all of my decisions related to my health. If I choose today to let the lazy version of me drive, she’s going to make my decisions. If I choose today to let this idea of who I am and what brings me fulfillment drive, she’s going to make all of my decisions with whatever goals she has in mind. And I can call that choosing myself, but I still have to ask who I’ve actually chosen.
But if I choose the version of me that is aligned with who God created, and who God had in mind, and what He had in mind, and not only what but how He had it in mind, she’s going to drive. And the way that she drives is that she lets go of the need to control how something will happen, or when it’ll happen. She’s choosing who God created her to be, but she’s also choosing to trust the One who created her. Because how am I going to choose who He had in mind while refusing to choose Him?
Jesus said to His disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.” And that’s what I’m talking about. Choose yourself, but only after you’ve chosen who’s chosen you. Because when I’m choosing who God created, I’m not trying to convince Him to want her. I’m choosing someone He already had in mind.
And I wrote something else that was like, not wanting something is as good as having it. When you don’t want control, that is when you get control. Not because you can suddenly make everything happen exactly the way you want it to, but because you can finally choose without needing to control everything that comes after. That’s when you’re finally able to have some sort of power. Because power belongs to God.
So much of what I’m talking about is that we have the power to choose. We can choose who gets preeminence. We can choose who’s driving. We can choose whether we’re going to keep going down a path because we’ve already spent so much time on it, or whether we’re willing to turn around.
In Deuteronomy, Moses puts life and death before the people and tells them to choose life. Jesus speaks about the narrow way that leads to life, and how few find it. So it isn’t just about having a choice. It’s about what you choose. And I’m not saying choosing the right path will never feel difficult. There’s still the labor of turning around. There’s still the surrender of how you thought something was going to happen, or when you thought it was going to happen.
But look how beautiful nature is.
The One who made it made it so that it can keep doing what it’s doing, and you’re not going to trust the wisdom behind a process that you’re actually a part of? You’re going to trust Him with all of that, but not with you?
I think about how much resistance there can be in trying to make a life work around an idea of ourselves that was never accurate to begin with.
How horrible it can feel to keep choosing something outside of who we authentically are, while calling it choosing ourselves.
The only thing I would caution you, the only thing I would advise, the only thing I can tell you as your friend, as your sister, as just another girl who happens to be alive at the same time as you, is to stop the wedding.
Stop marrying the concept of who you think will fulfill you. Stop attaching yourself to a million maybes and attach yourself to absolute certainty.
Not certainty about exactly how or when everything will happen, but certainty in the One you’ve chosen. The One who’s already chosen you. That is how you choose yourself. That is how you pick. Stop the wedding.
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