Picking Out a Shirt

Probably everyone knows at least one man who can’t dress himself well.  These men have no sense of color coordination, and their wives tell stories of mismatched socks, stripes paired with plaids, and ugly ties.  I am not one of those men.

I have excellent color coordinating skills.  However, I do love routine.  A couple of pairs of pants with matching shirts is all the wardrobe I need.  I had been wearing the same short sleeved buttoned shirts for a long time, and finally asked my wife to pick up a few new ones from the thrift store for me.  She came home with fifteen.  I picked out a dozen that I liked, and gave the rest away.

It is hard to make a routine out of a dozen shirts.  The trick is to pick out a couple of favorites, and ignore the fact the rest are there.  But one Sunday morning, the oddest feeling came over me.  I looked at my dozen shirts and thought “I don’t want to be in a rut of wearing the same shirts all the time”.  So I asked my wife to pick out a shirt for me to wear.

I wore my shirt to our Sunday gathering with the satisfaction I was not it a rut that day.  The good part about it was that I actually liked the shirt she selected.  I felt no loss from having relinquished the decision of how to dress that day.  It actually freed me from the nuisance of standing in front of my twelve shirts debating which one to wear.

If only I had someone to lead me in routine decisions throughout the week, someone who would keep me out of a rut, someone who would free my mind up from tedious choices that bog down my day.

If only I had someone who would always make the perfect choice, someone who knew how those around me would respond to the choice I had made. 

If only I could relinquish those choices as quickly and easily as I did that Sunday morning. 

If only I could come to the place where I really didn’t have a burning preference as to which choice was made, but would be deeply content with that someone’s choice in the matter.

If only my preferences and the preferences of this other someone could become so intertwined that I wasn’t sure if we were talking about my preference, or this other someone’s preference.

If only I had someone who would make decisions of life as simple as deferring to my wife the decision about which shirt to wear. 

Oh, but wait.  We do have that Someone.  There is in fact One who dwells within us, Who can do all of those things.  Perhaps He isn’t so much interested in which shirt we wear, but there is much He is interested in, probably more than we know.

Now, if only I had twelve pairs of pants.