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Monday, June 27, 2011

A Choice to be Made

After reading the Harry Potter series again for the 3rd time, I finally am starting to see the underlying message that Mrs. Rowling had placed in her ever incredible story.  Yes, there is a clear and defined moral.  It's that our actions and desires claim who we are in life.  Even from the very beginning Harry is faced with the prospect of being sorted into the Slytherin House, which he sorely desires not to go.  But as we come to find out, he wasn't sorted into Gryffindor solely because he wasn't meant for Slytherin, but rather because he desperately didn't want to become a Slytherin.  

As the books go on we see more and more instances of this being true.  Harry saves Wormtail from the fate he surely deserved and not to mention the fact that he set aside his loathing for Sirius to hear his case.  Then he saves Cedric from Krum and also allows him to take the cup at the same time as himself.  Even in the face of being possessed by Voldemort, Harry finds the means to unlock his happiness and remorse to defeat him.  It's this constant stream of if vigilance towards all things dark that sets Harry apart from Voldemort.  Even in the most minor of details, it is Harry's yearning for good and Voldemort's thirst for evil that allow the story to unfold as beautifully as it does.  As Harry approaches Death so openly, it is his will to save the people around him that keeps him alive and eventually kills Voldemort.  His quest to not only set himself apart from all things Dark, but to also not let anyone suffer on his behalf embodies why Harry wasn't picked to be Slytherin that day.  But it does something even more essential.  It is meant to teach us something as well.

In life we will always be faced with choices.  Whether they are big, small, difficult, or easy, however, doesn't matter.  It is the consistency that we have in making them that matters.  If it wasn't for the choices that we make and for the desires that we have to be fulfilled, then what would we have to define ourselves by?  We haven't been put here to only think and feel certain things.  Harry didn't just think to himself that he wished none of this bad stuff would happen, he made choices, and those choices became actions.  God didn't put us here in hopes that we would only think He was our savior, master, and creator.  But rather he hoped that we would discover that and teach everyone around us what we have learned.  He hoped that we would not only feel His goodness, but live in it also.

Like it or not we are going to be faced with big decisions in life. They may not be good and evil decisions, but they will be life altering.  Because, by the nature of decision, life is inherently altered.  So what I am asking, what I am hoping for myself and my friends and my very few readers and really everyone in the world, is to be weary of our decisions.  Put stock in them, and really believe in them for specific reasons.  Don't just act because there is action to be had.  But act because there is feeling behind that action.  Or else we are shaking Draco Malfoy's hand in front of the door to the great hall.  Or else, we're just drones, at the mercy of world around us.  And that is something that I wish on no one.