One of the songs John wrote back in our more musically productive years is called Choose Life! It is a kick to sing it, and even if I am feeling somewhat mediocre when we begin, the vibrancy of the words fills me by the second verse.
"Choose life! Choose Life! Choose life! Choose life!
If you return to God when you've been driven far away, and obey Him and do everything that He commands today, the Lord your God will bring you back from your captivity, He'll gather you from all the lands, wherever you may be. Choose life! Choose Life! Choose life! Choose life!
This command I'm giving isn't hard to understand. You don't have to find it in some far, distant land. It isn't up in heaven so you don't have to say, 'Who will bring it down so we can hear it and obey?..."
I recall a grammar rule from back in high school composition. Avoid the passive voice. That warning has lingered even longer than the one about dangling modifiers. Which I am guilty of on occasion.
Passive voice is often avoided by professional writers because it can make the sentence needlessly longer, more complicated and unclear as well as shifting the emphases away from the sentence subject. While there's nothing grammatically incorrect about passive voice, the general rule of thumb is to strive for less than 2% passive voice.
Choosing life would appear to be preferable to being dragged along like a reluctant collie on a leash. If there even are any such dogs. The writer whose book I keep referring back to, Kitchen Table Wisdom, says that there is a healthy way to be sick. It entails choosing life, rather than forfeiting to disease.
Early in our marriage John took a workshop on pastoral hospital visiting and was struck by the speaker's suggestion.
"When you arrive at the bedside of a patient, say that you hope they don't get better before they learn what they are supposed to."
Huh?
It seems that being passive makes our suffering needlessly longer, more complicated and unclear. It shines the light on the Problem as the subject of our story, leaving us in the shadows.
