Poor Decision Making

After all the plagues—the locusts and the lice, the flies and the boils, the death of livestock and the death of the children—the Israelites were camped out at the edge of a sea when the Egyptians came after them.

You have to wonder what possessed the Egyptians to come at all. Trying to keep the Israelites in Egypt had gone very badly (see the above plagues), until even Pharaoh’s priests and courtiers begged him to just let them go already, and Pharaoh—king and god of Egypt—agreed. So it’s odd that so soon after their departure he changed his mind and charged after them. It’s odder still that Pharaoh and his army weren’t put off by finding that their approach was immediately blocked by a mystical pillar of cloud that shrouded them in darkness, nor by the sea’s miraculous movement to allow the Israelites to walk through. If there had been any doubt in the divinity of their protection, surely there could be none now.

Still, in one of the great military blunders of history, Pharaoh and his 600 chariots advanced. The walls of water closed in on them, and they were all drowned.

The Jews by the Parting of the Sea by Yomam Ranaan

We don’t know what drove Pharaoh to the extremes that he took, but something did. Whether it was his pride, his thirst for revenge, his belief in his own divinity, or the fallacy of sunk costs, he allowed himself to be led astray when everyone and everything should have told him it was a bad idea. He refused to give up on something that the Lord asked him to let go of, something that was so clearly hurting him and others.

I’ve done that. I’ve had habits, people, and places that were not good for me that, when stress got high and morale got low, I went straight back to, even though God had asked me not to.

I don’t find self-condemnation especially helpful as I reflect on these things. Therapy and meditation have pretty much convinced me that curiosity and compassion are a better way to go poking around my more questionable decisions. “Why did I feel the need to put someone else down?” or “Why did I stay up late when I clearly would have felt better going to bed early?” is much more useful than, “Look at that stupid thing I did, I’m a terrible person, get it together, Marissa.”

I suspect that if you’d asked Pharaoh why he was so determined to pursue the Israelites, he would not really have been able to tell you. He would have said something about the Egyptian economy when, in fact, it was clear that the God of Israel was going to wreck Egypt’s economy along with Egypt itself as long as it held onto its Israelite slaves. Pharaoh made a terrible decision partly because he wasn’t honest about his motivations. He didn’t look at himself with clear eyes.

We are so often unaware of ourselves. This, I think, is why our all-knowing Lord asks us questions. In the New Testament, Jesus answered only three questions directly but asked over three hundred. God asks us so much more than He tells, and I think it’s partly because He wants us to learn to see ourselves. It’s so much harder to choose badly when you know why you’re doing it, and God wants us to know why. He wants us to be able to pull up next to our metaphorical Red Seas and say, “I know a lot of my identity is invested in this and I’ve sunk a lot into it already, but I’ve decided it’s a bad idea, and we should all go home.”

Yesterday I bought some makeup I didn’t need and ate a bowl of cookie dough, which made me sick. It was only three hours later, on the phone with my mom, that I realized my behavior was not about the makeup or the cookie dough—I was just having big post-therapy pre-period feelings.

I’ve been thinking about curiosity and compassion all week and, still, 2 PM yesterday saw me make several poor decisions in an attempt to not feel my feelings. I’m trying to be mindful, but I’m so bad at it. To steal from the great cinematic classic Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, “The concept is grasped. The execution is a little illusive.”