"I got a bad decision"...

Recently Josh has been saying something that I find hilarious.  Something so good that only a child could think of it.

He’s said, “I have a great idea!” for years now.  He starts a lot of his stories with this phrase.  He uses this phrase when he wants to go out with the family for ice cream or watch Netflicks.

But this week he started saying, “I have a bad decision!”  He says it with the same joyful exuberance as “I have a great idea!”

Recently we’ve had a bee issue in our backyard.  Ground bees have successfully built a huge colony under our yard over by the old oak tree and last week the boys decided to poke at it with sticks.  The bees promptly sent them away screaming and Josh got a fat lip that was 4 times the size of his already big bottom lip.  It was a bulbous mound of flesh swelling larger and larger with every hour that passed.

I told them that I was going to wait until the evening one night and light it on fire when they were all sleeping inside.  So yesterday Josh was talking about it and that’s when he busted out: “I have a bad decision!”

“Dad, why don’t you go out, sit on the bee hive, and let them sting your bottom until you have a bubble butt!”

Hahaha!  Bad idea, indeed.  I decided instead to pour some fuel down the hole at nightfall and blow the nest up like I was conducting a stealth airstrike in the Middle East.  It was glorious.

I started thinking that life really comes down to those two alternatives:

-       “I got a great idea!”

-       “I got a bad decision!”

Every day it seems I wake up faced with that fork in the road.  Either I’m disciplining my mind to look for great ideas to bring solutions to problems or I’m forming bad decisions about how to engage reality as it’s presenting itself to me. 

For me, the best way to avoid bad decisions is to concentrate my mind on great ideas.  An idle mind will often drift to poor choices of how I spent my time and energy.  I don’t’ know if everyone is like this, but my mind starts “looking for trouble” if I’m not purposed on “chasing a goal”.  It’s one or the other for me.

As I sat and listened to Josh yesterday, I was reminded that much of my life will be defined by whether I’m living out great ideas or bad decisions.  Both of these options are birthed in my brain at the beginning of every day waiting for me to choose which one I will feed and fuel. 

Out of the mouth of babes…