Growing up, I wanted to be presented with all the choices. I might always pick green, but I wanted the choice. Show me the blue, red, and yellow cups too. Green, please. Flip through all the smiley face stickers first, then I’ll choose green. Thank you.
My poor mother. She knew what I wanted in the end, but the process was part of the satisfaction of that decision for me. I’m sure the true cause of her salt-and-pepper hair is due to any one of my four other siblings, but I will concede my part in initiating this trajectory. Although being born first was never my choice.
Being creative and wanting to experience everything just goes hand-in-hand with the desire to see all the choices before making a decision. And it didn’t stay in my childhood. It has taken years of practicing self discipline to keep myself from exhausting the options in different areas of life. For example, scrolling through all the options shopping online for alarm clocks might as well be infinite, but I feel that I can not make a good decision until I’ve seen most of the options. I won’t even look at all of them, of course, because I will get bored and frustrated, but I must see some undetermined number before calling it quits and driving to the nearest grocery store for the second cheapest option available there. Sometimes less choices are great, especially if we’re talking consumer related products. But the reason we have this dilemma is because, at one point, there weren’t enough choices.
Early on, we’re taught that there are limits. Don’t touch. All done. No, no. These kinds of limits are good, healthy, and appropriate. Limits keep us safe and when a young child is unaware of the dangers, setting limits for them is crucial. As we grow, however, we inevitably discover that what once seemed like a hard line is actually flexible. “All done” suddenly does not mean that there is no more cookie. Beyond that we learn that there are more than two choices, more options than yes or no, and that the right or wrong thing to do may change based on the situation.
While this is normal for maturity, many of us hang onto the security that seeing the world in black and white provides. As the gray seeps in, some of us may reject it because it lacks the security that the separation once brought us. Some of us are invigorated by the potential; if there’s a gray area, what else could be possible?
Eventually we mature and settle into a semblance that reflects the morals we’ve been taught by example or acquired through experience, and understand that the world is full of nuance and a wide spectrum of varying shades and tints, rarely just two. As I matured, I realized that adults, in times of stress or fear like when there was a desire to defend their beliefs or opinions, they pulled back, attempting to separate the gray areas into black and white again. They were tired and scared and uncomfortable with trying to deal with the gray; a nebulous, shifting entity that required introspection, nuance, and context. So they gave up. “All done!” they said. If it was a moral issue, there was no room for interpretation.
They refused to entertain the idea that context and culture might have an influence on how something perceived as incorrect could be a desirable good, Biblical, or even honoring to God. The Either/Or culture took hold of the Church in America.
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