Consequences

Happy Sunday everyone! I'm still at my sister's house in Pennsylvania, and we are packing as much into each day as we can :-). This morning we're going to church with them (her husband is the children's pastor at a large church in Mechanicsburg), then we're heading to Hershey for the afternoon.

Yesterday we spent the day in Lancaster, where we visited a life-size replica of the Tabernacle, toured an Amish house and farm, and spent time at a farmer's market in Bird-in-Hand (I love the name!). The hands-down highlight of our day was attending the Sight & Sound Millennium Theater's production of "In the Beginning." After doing their creative best to depict the beauty of the Garden of Eden and life in a world untouched by sin, watching Eve's temptation and the fall was hard. It was all I could do to keep from shouting out "Don't do it!" as Eve struggled with whether or not to taste the forbidden fruit. Of course, she did, and it was sobering to watch how the joy they experienced in Eden was quickly replaced by despair as Adam and Eve began to deal with the consequence of the choice they made. And the world, and life, has never been the same. It was striking to watch Adam and Eve deal with the death of their son, Abel, and realize that their actions had resulted in his death - and their own profound pain.

That's the problem with consequences - we usually never see them coming. We get caught up in the moment and go after the immediate gratification without taking time to consider what the long-term effects might be. Certainly no decision we make, good or bad, will ever have the long-reaching consequences that resulted from the Fall (thank God for that!), but that doesn't mean that our decisions happen in a vacuum.

We are faced with choices every day on a variety of issues, and sometimes we don't even realize we're making choices because we determined a long time ago what our values would be. If a store clerk accidentally gives me too much change, I don't waste a second deciding whether or not to point it out, because I made a decision a long time ago to be honest. Those decisions are easy, and they're pretty clear-cut.

The decisions that are more challenging are the ones where there is no right and wrong, where it's more a matter of choosing the better of two options. How to spend our money or our leisure time, or, for those of us focused on getting to or maintaining a healthy weight, what we're going to eat.

Choosing to stay on plan or not certainly isn't a moral issue, but there ARE consequences to our choice. We may not experience the consequences, good or bad, right away, but we most certainly will.

As I think back to the funeral of my mom's cousin last month, I know this cousin had no idea that years of obesity and the resulting complications of diabetes would result in her passing away one week before her first grandchild was born. This was an unforeseen consequence, and I can't help but wonder if knowing years ago how things would end would have motivated her to make different choices.

Choosing to do what's hard now and get to a healthy weight will result in consequences (the good kind!) that you may not be able to imagine right now, but they WILL come. Staying on plan today certainly doesn't provide the immediate gratification that eating off plan might, but there's no comparison when we look the long-term consequences. Bottom line: you'll never regret staying on plan today, and you'll reap the long-term rewards of doing so. So go for it!