No-Choice Dresses

My Mom tells a story about her younger years when she and her sisters had to get “no-choice” dresses from the Sears Roebuck catalog. It was okay, she said, unless you got three of the same dress…not so great.

Fast forward a few decades, and well, times are a bit different. I feel that many times we have too many options. For example, Madi will come down for breakfast and I will give her a few options for breakfast…granola bar, waffle, cereal…and she will say, “I don’t like those options, what else do you have”.

I mean, seriously?

The other thing that we have been talking about lately is churches. Where I grew up, the options for churches was pretty limited. In Grand Rapids however, there are hundreds of churches to choose from, and scores of churches that would fit what we are looking for in a church. So it comes down to differences in worship style, types of programming, church culture, rather than issues with beliefs or standards.

We have recently been exploring some different churches closer to our house, and I feel like Ben and I turn into “church analysis professionals” on the drive home, digging into all of the minutia that would or would not fit our family.

Big…small…worship style…size of kids classes…did Madi like it…were the people friendly…would we be able to contribute…do they want to serve the community…are there people we could connect with…is there solid programming for the kids…do the sermons dig into the Bible and challenge us…sigh.

Maybe having more choices just makes us have to go through the process of really uncovering what would be the best choice. We are looking at churches mainly because of the location and wanting to be more involved as the kids get older, and yeah, it is forcing us to prioritize what is important to us in a church. It’s a good process, albeit a little frustrating. And hopefully, by giving my kids choices about food now, they will be able to have an independent mind and learn to make wise choices in the future.

I’ll let you know how that turns out…