In his book Life is Messy, Matthew Kelly describes a childhood incident in which he, along with his brothers, came across a shiny new soccer ball left unattended in a local park, which the boys claimed as their own and gleefully raced home with.

They showed it to their father, who thought for a moment before asking, “Do you think you found it, or do you think someone lost it?”

Unmoved, the boys asked if they could keep it. Their father’s next question: “How would you feel if you lost that soccer ball?”

More than a bit reluctantly, the boys returned to the park, where they encountered a father and his sobbing son searching the field for the new soccer ball, which the boy had received for his birthday the day before. The joy on the father and son’s faces when the missing ball was returned to its rightful owner remains etched, decades later, in Kelly’s memory.

If only every child on the planet could have a parent as wise as Kelly’s dad. I love that Mr. Kelly didn’t lecture, didn’t scold, didn’t get angry—there was more to what he said, but all of it spoke to his sons of their choices, choices they already knew, at some level, they would have to make.

Part of what the Kelly boys learned that afternoon is that the lives they’d eventually build for themselves would be constructed from the choices they made every day, in matters both large and small.

The average adult today makes in the neighborhood of 35,000 decisions every day, according to a figure bandied about in current conversation, apparently credible enough to be repeated by PBS, the Harvard Business Review, and in a Microsoft commercial, though I couldn’t find a definitive source. That’s a ton of choices, many of which are fairly mindless and likely have only minor impacts on who we’re becoming. In addition, a good portion of them can be reversed. But the effect of it this: the sum of our decisions eventually accumulates into a critical mass which, in turn, makes a critical difference.

The power to choose is God-given and it’s a great gift. Like many of God’s gifts, it can be abused. What’s the basis for the choices I make every day? What’s yours? Do we make decisions based on what we know to be true and right in our hearts, guided by our best selves and our best knowledge of our Creator? Do we do it with purpose? Or is our self-interest more typically at the forefront? On what do we base our habits? My answer to those questions would take some thought, and I don’t think I’m alone. 

When the soccer ball was returned to its rightful owner, Kelly wrote, “I felt the warm glow of goodness inside me.”

Our choices will tell our stories, says Christian writer and Oxford professor C.S. Lewis, who called our daily actions “beachheads” for the work God is trying to do in our lives. Each step away from what we know is right, he says, creates a launching point from which it’s easier to move on to bigger missteps and, conversely, each step we take toward the light lands us on a beachhead from which we’re more apt to move even closer to it. 

Ultimately, you’re choosing the kind of person you want to be. Pastor Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, says, “Character development always involves a choice.”

The stakes are high, even beyond the foundational need for character development. After the Jewish nation made its miraculous escape from captivity in Egypt, its leader, Moses, called the people together and told them they must remain faithful to the God who’d made that escape possible. In the face of their rebellion and disobedience, he told them then—and us today—that there is “set before you a choice of two ways. And I ask heaven and earth to be witnesses of your choice. You can choose life or death. The first choice will bring a blessing. The other choice will bring a curse. So choose life!”

The choice is ours, and we’re making it every day.