The Importance of Choice

 In Snow White and the Huntsman we meet two women; both beautiful, both powerful, and both capable of leading a nation. Ravena, an evil queen and sorceress, is bitter, ruthless, and vengeful, valuing her beauty above all else. Flashbacks occur throughout the film giving us the faintest of inklings about Ravena's tragic past, one filled with hurt, betrayal, and darkness. She knows pain and it has scarred her.

Snow White--beautiful and powerful in her own right, has had her share of tragedy. A witness to her father's brutal murder at the hands of a wicked step-mother, and left to languish in a tower, she too has known pain. Yet both women choose very different paths. One finds her identity in her beauty, something she uses to control and manipulate others, while Snow White perseveres, believing against the odds that she can overcome. This is just a movie of course, and there are other examples--Harry Potter and Voldemort, Gollum and Frodo--the tension of two similar characters, one the hero, the other the antagonist.

And the message in all of them comes down to the importance of choice. This world affords us a host of painful experiences including death, loss, illness, disease, and heartbreak. As assuredly as the sun will rise tomorrow, you will at one point or another experience one of, if not all of these things. {And as Christians, it's almost guaranteed!} The bumper sticker got it right here. It happens, it rains on the just and unjust alike but the moral of the story is this.

We are powerful.

We possess the ability to choose how we react to what we are dealt--not just in actions, but within our own hearts. We can choose to be bitter, vengeful, and ugly, or we can be the archetypal hero who chooses love in the face of pain, victory in the face of defeat, perseverance in the face of impossibility, and truth in the place of lies. It is the *tiniest* of lines, the slowest of heart fades, that defines the villain {even if you're just your own worst enemy) from the hero.

It begins in the heart, but it always ends with a choice. You are powerful, you can choose. Which will you be?