I’ve been whining (and I do mean whining) about the hard choices I’ve had to make lately:  to stay as an independent contractor or find full-time employment, to sell my house or fix it up, and even the hard choices around smaller life stuff, how to return phone calls when I’m exhausted from traveling and not eager for normal conversation. How do I know when to spend time on me or fulfill my obligations?

Last night I came home from work and felt I needed a night off. However, Tuesday is the night my warrior buddies and I get together, sit in circle and answer the question, “So what’s up?” in the most heartfelt way we can. It’s not always pretty and it’s not always fun, but it feeds my life and helps me grow closer to the man I have always wanted to be.

But I wanted a night off.

I called my buddy Stephen to help me decide, asking him to listen to the story I was telling myself, and asking him to call ‘bullshit’ if it seemed I was actively lying to myself. Okay, maybe I was half-looking for a big, “Awwwwww….you poor guy!” and permission to skip.

“If you don’t show up tonight,” he said, “men in our group will suffer.”

Not exactly the permission slip I was looking for.

“And if you show up tonight just for us, you will suffer. All of your choices will lead to suffering for someone.”

This infuriated me, because after discussing it a few more moments with him, turns out that he’s right. All the hard choices have consequences to someone and even the very best decisions sometimes leave a lasting mark.

When I start feeling sorry for myself regarding the choices I face, I think of a 15-year-old girl named Cassaundra, someone killed at Columbine High School back in 1999. I read about Cassaundra during the media frenzy that followed the shooting. When the two gun-totting killers stopped next to her, one of them asked, “Do you believe in God?”

She said, “Yes.”

They shot her in the head.

The story is horrific of course, one of the many nightmare stories to come from that day. What continues to amaze me is that Cassaundra was faced with a hard choice, one that meant she would not ever worry about a mortgage, or career, or go see another movie. She would never have the luxury of another hard choice again. In that light, all my hard choices seem silly. She could have begged. She could have said something like, “Define God…” because who knows, maybe they would have let her live if she believed in Buddha.

But what they printed about her at the time was that Cassaundra used to practice witchcraft, this high school junior, considered herself a pagan until roughly a year earlier she discovered Jesus Christ. This odd detail impresses me even more because Cassaundra had given conscious thought to her faith, and when she said she “Yes, I believe,” it wasn’t a reflex reaction from being taught in Bible school.

She knew what she was saying. She understood the consequences.
Could I do that?

Would I choose my integrity, my faith, knowing what would immediately follow?

I started this post reflecting on my ‘hard choices’ and now, here at the end, I can’t even remember why I thought my decisions were hard. I struggle with big life decisions:  keep my house or sell it, how to make money, how much to plan for retirement and how much to live in the present. And none of those details seem to matter as much as Cassaundra’s hard decision.

We never met; she doesn’t know the end of her life touched mine. But I do try to honor her, if that’s possible, by trying to say, “Yes” with my authentic self to the parts of my life that require unflinching integrity. Most days, I’m not as good at it as she was, so I try to learn from her. Some days, the hardest choice I make is to keep my heart open say, “Yes.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 18th, 2009 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Warrior. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.