DECISIONS! WHAKATAU! We cannot get through life without making decisions. Every day we make them – from the time we get up in the morning to the time we go to bed at night. When you stop and think about it, everything we do depends on making decisions – and success in whatever sphere of life we are involved in, depends on making the right decisions. Many of the decisions we make not only involve ourselves, but also our families, our friends, our workmates – either for good or for bad. Some decisions affect us for the rest of our lives. The right decision can bring joy and happiness for years; the wrong decision can bring tragedy. The young guy with his brain burned out and his health shattered at the age of 19 because of drugs, got that way through a process of decision-making. But his decisions were wrong. He got in with the wrong company and listened to the wrong people. The young teenage mother who finds herself in over her head, with little family support and deserted by the father of her child, also made some decisions that led to her predicament. Those decisions were also wrong. The alcoholic wasting away with serious liver disease did not get that way over night. It all began with a bad decision years before which led to further bad decisions. And we will never know the number of other people affected along the way. One wrong decision leads to another and on it goes. What went wrong with the decision-making of the young woman found dead in her car after taping the windows, feeding in a rubber hose from the exhaust and starting the motor? How many wrong decisions did it take to arrive at such a tragedy? Some years ago a young man sat in front of me and told me something of the mess his life was in and that he didn’t know what to do next. He too had made his decisions. Most of them were bad and some were just plain stupid. The saddest part of it all was that he was not prepared to make the all important decision which would have brought the resources and strength into his life to enable him to start making the right decisions.
2
