There’s a hymn that we sang in church at the end of August, ‘Give Thanks With A Grateful Heart.’  I challenged the congregation to come up with a popular song that had a very similar tune.  At the end, as he was leaving, a man came up and said, ‘It was the something people, who wore leather jackets and other strange clothes.’  

‘Oh no,’ I said dismissively, ‘I don’t think that’s it.’  Because stuck in my head was ‘Go West,’ by the Pet Shop Boys.  However, something nagged at me to check, and lo and behold, there was an earlier version of the same song by … The Village People.  Who did indeed wear distinctive clothing.  I sent a grovelling apology to the man in question, not just because he was almost right, but because I should know by now not to be dismissive about things people say, and because of a very important principle: sometimes there is more than one right answer to a question, or more than one solution to a problem, and both or all may be right. 

I really ought to have this deeply imbedded in my consciousness, because very early in my education for ministry I learned that this principle applies to study of the Bible.  For example, there are four gospels in the New Testament that tell the story of the life and ministry of Jesus.  They do not all tell it in the same way.  Why are there differences?  Well, the best analogy that I came across was to imagine four people each standing at a different corner of an intersection who witness a traffic accident.  They will all see the same accident, but each will see it from a different point of view.  So their accounts will differ.  Those who assembled the Bible in the early days of the church, instead of trying to aggregate the four versions into a single homogenous gospel, simply left the four separate accounts to be read to give an added dimension to the whole account.  So the gospel writers give a consistent picture, but with different emphases and details. 

The Hebrew (Jewish) Scriptures, (the Old Testament), similarly integrate different versions of the relationship between humanity and our divine creator.  There are often odd differences - the most glaring being that the flood story of Noah would seem to have been derived from two separate accounts.  Those who compiled the book of Genesis simply decided that each one must have had some value to the person who recounted it, so they included both.  We have been conditioned by a combination of Greek philosophical analysis and the Enlightenment to expect that there is always a single right answer for any question, and that with enough diligence it will eventually be found.  This is not always the case.  

When I was in Silicon Valley I needed to recruit a secretary.  The choice came down to two candidates, each of whom seemed very competent, and I agonised over the selection, beguiling myself into believing that one of them must be better than the other.  So I hired the one who seemed to be a little more vivacious.  After a couple of months someone else made her a better offer and she left.  So, with no little embarrassment, I went back to the alternative candidate, who was still available - which was fortunate for me, because she was probably the best secretary that I had in that career - an efficient assistant, well-liked co-worker, and committed team member.  However, she couldn’t resist the temptation to remind me occasionally that she had been my second choice!  It served to remind me that sometimes, there is no need to agonise over a decision or a choice because, yes, there just might be two right answers.  At least! 

How much energy do we expend agonising over decisions or choices when in fact it doesn’t matter, because there are two or more right answers?  Probably far more than we would like to admit.  

Along with our preoccupation about making the one perfect choice, when quite often there is more than one right answer, is a kind of obsession with looking over our shoulders and wondering what might have been, what might have happened if we made a different decision.  There is an obscure, but very pretty song by Elias Kovanko and Julia Andersson called ‘Things That Might Have Been.’  The lyrics include: ‘In painful silence I now weep / About the things that might have been.’  This is seldom productive.  In one of the Narnia stories by CS Lewis, at one point Lucy asks the lion, Aslan (who represents Christ), a question along the lines of what might have been, which elicits the answer: ‘No one is ever told what might have been.’ 

I am very fond of the writing of Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth century Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic, and religious author, who highlighted the importance of personal choice and commitment.  He has some very quotable sayings, but his work can be complex and challenging to read at times.  He is the one who wrote, ‘It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.’  This is rather pertinent when considering the subject of choice and decision-making, because quite often we only discover the result of our decisions with hindsight. 

In other words, once we have made a choice, all we can do, in most cases, is to move on.  The song by Elias Kovanko and Julia Andersson continues: ‘We live our lives the way we choose, but we can’t replay the games we lose.’  And many times, as Kierkegaard pointed out, we don’t know that we have lost a game, until later - sometimes much later.  

One of the greatest gifts we are given, apart from life itself, is the gift of choice, of free will.  Admittedly, we do not always exercise our free will in ways that are beneficial to ourselves, never mind the common good.  So what do we do about the wrong choices, when there may or may not have been one or more good or ‘right’ choices or decisions, and it seems as though we failed to select any of them?  One answer, of course, is that if we have made a mistake, then we can learn from it, and perhaps avoid making the same error twice.  We might also do our best to acknowledge the error so that others may be guided by our experience.  

However, having guided and maybe even nurtured several young people through adolescence, I have come to realise that it is not easy to prevent the sins of the parents being visited upon the children.  They march boldly into territory from which we thought we might have kept them.  A not-so-serious example is the time that I tried to ignite a Christmas pudding with brandy from a bottle that had evidently had a little water (or maybe not a little!) added to make the volume stay constant.  Oh how our youthful sins come back to haunt us! 

Another answer to the question of what we can do about the errors we make is simply to be patient, to see what the longer term consequences may be.  For one thing, life sometimes presents us with new alternatives and opportunities.  For another, mistakes sometimes have a beneficial effect: such as mould in Alexander Fleming’s contaminated bacterial culture that turned out to be penicillin.  

Søren Kierkegaard wrote that life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.  Keeping that in mind might make the experience less stressful.