Divergent: One Choice Can Transform You

 

“One choice can transform you.”

In Divergent, Beatrice faces a choice that will change her life forever. She can choose any of the five factions to live in… forever. It will determine who her friends are. Who she will marry. What job she will have. What skills she will learn. What philosophy she will model her life around. What virtue she will pursue far beyond any other. Her choice of faction will shape the rest of her life.

Once she’s made the choice, there is no turning back. No other faction will take her. In large part, she will be isolated from the other factions. Once she has chosen, she will belong to that faction and no other.

Beatrice isn’t in the hands of fate. She’s the one who gets to choose. I can’t imagine facing that kind of choice. I chose where to go to college, and in large part that determined a lot of things. I met my bride there. I met many of my closest friends there. The college didn’t isolate me from every other college or choice, though. If I had wanted, I could have changed majors or colleges. Sure, I might have wasted a few years of life and a lot of money, but it’s not like the choice that Beatrice faces.

That kind of choice brings with it a lot of stress. It weighs on you. If you make the wrong choice, it ruins your life, and possibly the lives of those around you as you can’t pull your own weight in your faction!

What are the biggest choices you’ve made in your life? What choices have transformed you? Depending on where you are in life, you’ll answer those questions differently. You’ve never chosen a faction, but you have chosen friends. That choice can transform you in ways you don’t realize until many years later. Your choice of spouse – or your choice of not having a spouse – obviously changes you. Your choice of profession or school makes you different. But are any of those your biggest choices?

What choice has transformed you the most?

In Beatrice’s world, there are five factions. Each one looks at life differently. Each one will develop one virtue to an incredible degree (at least when the factions work as they should).

In our world, there are only two factions.

There are the Industrious. You’re born into this faction. It’s known for setting laws and obeying them. Of course, each member has a basic set of laws to follow, but how they follow is largely up to them. They really do try to make this world a better place. But one thing is sure: they never know if they’ve followed their own rules well enough. Oh, yes, they’re by nature hostile to God.
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Then there are the Quiescent. They also work hard, but their goal is not to clean up this world. Rather, they desire to give glory to the One who made it. They rest well at night, not because they work so hard, but because someone else worked hard for them. They are children of God.

You don’t get a Choosing Ceremony. At no point do you face a crowd like Beatrice does, choosing which faction will hold your allegiance.

By nature, you belong to the Industrious. By birth, you hate God and would never, ever choose him. The meaning to the third article of the Apostle’s Creed says it well: “I believe that I cannot by my own thinking or choosing believe in Jesus Christ or come to him.”

What choice has transformed you the most?

The choice that transformed you the most was not your choice to make. Rather, God chose you. Jesus says it bluntly: “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will last” (John 15:16).

This is the miracle of God: you weren’t even a beggar on the street reaching out for bread. By nature, you were Industrious. You thought you had it together. You didn’t even realize you were starving. But God chose you. He opened your eyes to your terrible need… and then he fulfilled that need. He became the Bread of Life for you.

One choice transformed him… as he became a beggar like us. He humbled himself and became human. He died for all the Industrious that would never choose him.

And then he chose you. He reached out with his Word and Sacraments to make you Quiescent. He opened your eyes so you realized you were only a beggar… and then he gave you bread. He gave you forgiveness and chose you to become his own dear child.

Beatrice’s choice will follow her the rest of her life. God’s choice will follow you into eternal life. Because he has chosen you, because he has elected you from before the creation of the world, you will join him in heaven forever. You don’t have to be scared of your own Choosing Ceremony, because God has made the right choice for you forever. You never have to worry about choosing your faction, because God has made you Quiescent. He has given you peace. You can be at rest in him. Instead of sweating through your own labor, he sweated and died for you.

There are a lot of choices that you can make in this world. Those choices really do transform you. You can choose your friends, your college, your spouse, your job. But the choice that transforms you most is the choice that God made when he claimed you as his own, made you his child by water and the Word, and called you by name.