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The best advice comes from within

All my life folks have turned to me for advice. In childhood, my own father used to ask me about certain issues – about what I thought should be said or done. In childhood, mind you, even before I was a teenager he would ask. And he was not the only one to do so. During my teen years I was often the friend everybody turned to for advice. In adulthood, and especially after nursing school, it got worse.

Why “worse”? Think about it…

As time has passed I have become more and more reluctant to give advice. Not that I don’t want to – almost always I do want to tell folks what to do. It’s just that I cannot know if the advice I want to give is right for the one who has laid his or her problems out before me.

Thankfully, the passing years have taught me that I cannot know.

Granted, what I want to tell somebody to do, or not do, may be the very thing they decide in the end to do, or not do. I’ve seen that happen many times. Sometimes I have rejoiced. Sometimes I have wished there had been a better way or answer, just a different direction.

In the end (which never really comes – I don’t know why we say “in the end”) life is just what it is, and you and I can’t do a thing to change that fact. That fact, and the fact that God is God ... Regardless of what we perceive God to be – in the end, it must be enough to simply know that “God is.”

Believing and knowing and trusting. Three very different words.

Many things have brought me to this realm of thought today.

When people turn to me for advice, I often tell them to make a list of their options. You would be surprised how many times folks will say they have no options. That is never true. We ALWAYS have options. We may not like our options, but we have them.

I like to suggest that these options be written down across the top of a page. One of my favorite ways of approaching this exercise is to encourage folks to alternately record under each option positive and negative reasons or consequences for choosing each option and see what they run out of first.

Granted, I have had people tell me there are no positive reasons and no way anything good can come out of any of the options that are open to them.

That also is never true. Something good can come out of anything. No matter how bad a situation is something good can come out of it.

Consider the Holocaust. How much more horrible could anything be? Yet, who among us has not learned from the horror of that long hour? Who can read about those events and not ask themselves what they would have said or done?

It is “something good” when we are prompted to search our souls. It is “something good” when we dig deep within ourselves in search of courage to act on our convictions.  It is “something good” when we choose to stand on those convictions and say yes to what we perceive to be right and no to what we perceive to be wrong.

It bothered me that I never heard President Bush answer the question, “Have you made mistakes?”

Actually, I find such a query somewhat pathetic in that it so often came from supposedly intelligent journalists. I suspect that George W. Bush has made decisions which have been hard to live with. I suspect there is not a day that goes by in which he does not weigh heavily his options and attempt to evaluate the potential consequences of each potential choice that he makes.

Today, as I sit before my keyboard, it is Veterans Day in America. Renowned terrorist Yassar Arafat died in France this morning and the world is preparing to mourn his passing in Egypt. I am told elections will be held for his replacement and that George Bush supports the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. American soldiers are dying in Iraq in an ongoing effort to prepare that country for its citizens to choose its leaders in free elections – leaders who will make choices for those they are elected to serve. Much is happening in the world today.

Choices (options) abound and consequences are far reaching at every level and for every heart. I suppose only eternal history can answer some questions.