Earlier this year, Linda and I took a group tour to England. Now, as any traveler will tell you, group tours have their good points: they remove a lot of the muss, fuss, and inefficient indecision from travel, because the organizers pretty much make all the decisions for you. But those same points can wind up on the other side of the balance when you feel like making a different decision, and you can't.

Case in point: Stratford-upon-Avon. Left to our own devices, we could have spent a long, long time wandering Shakespeare's streets. ("If he came back today, he'd find things pretty much as he left them," intoned our guide just as a cheery McDonald's restaurant hove into view.)

In the real world, however, we had two and a half hours, including time for lunch. So we did the best we could--Will's birthplace, the church where he's buried, the house his daughter later owned--but had to pass on plenty else, like Anne Hathaway's cottage. McDonald's and Ye Olde Pizza Hut notwithstanding, we skipped lunch; that decision was easy.

So easy, in fact, that more than a few of our fellow travelers opted just for shopping and lunch. Wonderingly, I shook my head: If it were soft goods and mushy food they sought, wouldn't it have been better to drive across the suburbs to Stratford Square than to journey across the pond to Stratford-upon-Avon?

But wait a minute.

This is too easy a trap to fall into. We want it all our way: to have someone else make the decisions, to have those decisions be the ones we would have made, and to have the whole world accept the wisdom and inevitability of these same decisions, too. Wonderingly, I shake my head: How naive can I really be?

For, after all, if I really felt so strongly about these decisions and choices, here would have been my chance to share, explain, and defend my own. If I really thought two and a half hours in Stratford-upon-Avon was far too little, here would have been my chance to set aside the convenience of the tour and follow through. If I really thought I needed to change someone's mind about the relative merits of history and haberdashery, of sonnets and souvenirs, here would have been my chance.

How often are we guilty of committing, or omitting, the same attitudes and actions here at home? The parallels that can be drawn from this anecdote are nearly unending, and most can be powerfully applied to something far more serious than a week's vacation: our daily lives both inside and outside the church.

Shouldn't we be leading, not waiting or following, when the easy way to live our lives is not the best way? Shouldn't we be speaking up, not acquiescing, when hasty choices threaten to lead others astray? And shouldn't we be doing more than just shaking our heads and considering ourselves inevitably wise?

Every day that we don't ask these questions, we miss an opportunity to lead our world to Christ. The resumption of our fall schedule of activities at Libertyville Covenant is yet another chance to make sure the world hears us answering them.