Second Choice - Foreword

Most of us want to live as well as possible - get the most out of life, do our best, make a mark, work well, love and be loved, enjoy and give joy, and, finally, come to a good death. Given the near universality of what we intend, it is somewhat surprising that the human race doesn’t get better as the centuries unfold. What we know and what we have has increased enormously but our bigger barns of information and technology and possessions don’t seem to have done much for our souls. We aren’t any better.

Some of us, when we realize this, start looking around for help. It doesn’t take long to discover that there have always been a few men and women around who get noticed as ‘wise’ - the ones who live well and are able to guide others into living well. We call them in, adopting them as fathers and mothers, as friends and companions, as mentors and guides, to help us to live well, to live sane and whole, to live what our ancestors have been bold to name ‘a holy life’. But it’s easy to miss them. Their characteristically quiet voices don’t call attention to themselves. Meanwhile the world is noisy with in-your-face self-promoting experts who get our attention by promising all sorts of excitement, power, longevity, health, serenity, prosperity and glamour. It doesn’t take long to realize that none of them knows much about living well, what our Bibles name as eternal life, Real Life. Wise men and women are there for the finding, but they don’t give media interviews.

Viv Thomas in Second Choice has done his best to make sure that we don’t miss one of the enduringly best of the ‘wise,’ namely, Daniel. Daniel, throughout our Jewish and Christian ancestry, has had an enormous influence in providing example and direction to people of faith for living at our best, living sane and faithful and holy. And especially during times when a faithful, sane and holy life seems totally irrelevant to what is held up by the cultures as ‘in’.

We are glutted with information but we are starved for wisdom. We know so much about everything under the sun, but we live astonishingly trivial lives. Why? Why do we know so much and live so badly? Well, partly at least because we as a culture are admiring all the wrong people and have lost touch with ‘the wise’.

The wise person doesn’t know more, he or she lives more. All the truth is lived truth for the wise, truth tested and refined and tempered in the crucible of street and market, bedroom and kitchen, cancer and rejection, children and marriage. Wisdom is lived truth.

I’ve never understood why Daniel, who for so long held a prominent position in the biblical pantheon of ‘the wise’, in our times became marginalized into a children’s song (‘Dare to be a Daniel’) and depersonalized into a puzzle piece in a scenario for the End Time. But here he is, back again, with Viv Thomas’s help, vigorous and robust as ever, living a holy life in an unholy time, a serious worshipper of God in a trivializing culture. His unholy time and trivializing culture are strikingly similar to our own. He continues as one of the best of the ‘wise’ whom God has given to those of us who follow Jesus, a wise companion in living sane and holy lives.

EUGENE H. PETERSON
Professor Emeritus of Spiritual Theology
Regent College, Vancouver B.C., Canada