Important moments are often the hardest. But sometimes, they can also be the smallest.
Defining moments. Everyone knows the kind.
You see them coming, and you think them through. You ask for the advice of mentors and friends. You call your family and ask folks to pray for guidance.
You sleep on it, pray and prepare yourself for a life-changing decision.
When the time comes, you brace yourself, take a deep breath, and make a decision that will surely change your life and shape who you are. You know that one day, you will look back on that moment and still see the ripple effects it left on your life.
But how do you reach the level of character these defining moments demand? How does one achieve the level of clarity and morality necessary to do the right thing?
How do you make the choice that leads toward a brighter future— not just for yourself but for those around you?
These choices don’t come around often, so how do you prepare for them?
By living in the day-to-day.
Recently, I had a choice at a festival I attended. While at the festival, I sat down with my friend to breathe and relax. We still had half the day ahead of us to enjoy, but it was then that I received a message on my phone. It was a message reminding attendees of that evening’s meeting, a meeting to which I had RSVPed a month before.
I had made a mistake by forgetting about the meeting. But there was nothing that could be done to fix that mistake and I now had a choice in front of me: stay at the festival or leave right away and make it to the meeting.
But this wasn’t one of those defining moments that shaped my life. It was an in-the-moment choice that faced me then. This was small and it would have little to no effect on the rest of my life.
Or would it?
While defining moments are important for transitions in life, we don’t live in those moments constantly. Where we live is in the day-to-day. Life happens in the small moments, where little changes.
A person’s character is truly defined by the day-to-day. Those moments expand to serve as examples of character and ethics and this expansion continues until a lifetime of small choices shapes who a person is.
It is what we do when we believe the decision doesn’t matter that creates the person who can make the right decision when it truly does.
At the festival, though I desperately wanted to stay and enjoy myself, I made the decision to go to the meeting. To mold myself into the person I wanted to be. I chose to keep my word.
Because the character I wanted to build was one of reliability and responsibility. A character of selflessness.
When we consider everyday choices with the care often saved for defining moments, every page of our lives can demonstrate who we are and grow us into the kind of person we should strive to be.
In Luke 16:10, Jesus tells the parable of the shrewd manager. At the end of the parable, He says that “whoever is faithful in very little is also faithful in much” (Luke 16:10).
Jesus says that what we do in our small moments is the most reliable indicator of what we will do when our choice truly counts. When we can be trusted with small things, we can be trusted with larger jobs.
We can be ready for them.
Those small faithful moments don’t just build up character. They also reinforce the ability to handle stress and tough decisions.
We learn from our experiences how to face what comes next.
Our small moments build us into capable people ready for change. Our large works help us shape our world.
Johnna Ryan is a rising sophomore at Palm Beach Atlantic University. She is pursuing a major in English and a minor in Creative Writing, with plans to expand her graduate studies into Classics . She is an aspiring author and novelist, and a currently published poet. She is the Summer 2024 Ernest C. Hynds Jr. intern at Good Faith Media
