My family got into a pretty heated debate about whether or not we always make the best decision. My brother argued that every decision we make is always the best decision because, otherwise, we wouldn't have made that decision. Most of us were uncomfortable with this proposition because we all have a lot of personal and observational experience of making decisions that are stupid, self-destructive, or suboptimal. My brother contended that the final consequences that inevitably ensue from our choices can't have any bearing on our decision because it is impossible to know for certain what those consequences might be, so that any ex post facto analysis of a particular decision and whether or not it was good or bad has no relevance to the fact that in the moment, given our current understanding of all of the available choices and our rank ordering of our best guess of what the future consequences will be, in conjunction with the constellation of emotional states, social considerations, moral obligations, and the degree to which we weigh instant versus delayed gratification more heavily, given all of this, we always make the best decision. I got somewhat hung up on the distinction between the best decision we can make with the limited information and powers that we have and the best possible decision for that particular moment. I argued that there was some platonic ideal of a decision that was the absolute best, even if we would almost always never be able to make that perfect decision. My brother, from a much more practical perspective, said that even if such an ideal, perfect decision existed, of which he was skeptical, it wouldn't matter because we can only make the choices that we can actually make, and so the one we do make ends up being the best one. I didn't particularly like this argument because it meant we were always doomed to be making decisions that might be the best on a local scale but always would fall short of the absolutely best decisions. But that's basically our reality. Or rather, that would be our reality if not for one thing: the Atonement of Jesus Christ. When we have made a decision, because of the way time works, we are stuck with that particular decision. Christ's Atonement does not allow us to go back in time and change what we in hindsight view as a bad decision into a better one. What Christ is able to do is take our chaotic, meandering timeline, with all of its false starts and dead ends and self-destructive spirals and shortcuts that take twice as long, and despite how messy and decidedly not the best our collection of decisions have been, Christ will work with our jumbled up ball of yarn of a timeline and weave it into a beautiful tapestry. And once it has all been placed in the proper context, we will see that even what we have considered to be our worst and most unforgivable mistakes will truly have been the best decisions because they too are a part of the masterpiece that Christ has made of our lives. To quote from JRR Tolkien’s Leaf By Niggle, “Things might have been different, but they could not have been better.” I hope that we will all come again and again to the Savior so that He can help to make sure that all of our decisions truly are the best.
