Second Choice

This is a book about how we live our lives. Our modern culture seems to insist that it is only people who come first or are winners who are able to live lives of significance. Through money, power, image and education we are intended to possess the ability to go for our preferred options and make our choices. In our ideal world we choose our job, spouse, entertainment, company, community and religion with time and freedom. And most of us like to have our first choice.

In the real world things do not work out so smoothly. Even if we have the opportunity to employ our power of choice the first choice often goes wrong. Somehow our first choice gets contaminated or corrupted. It changes and in the process we are changed along with it. What looked like an outstanding selection at first, turns into something less or much different than we anticipated.

Second Choice challenges some of the assumptions in Western culture and gives a different slant on the idea of success. Viv Thomas insists that to live our lives well it is vital that we are able to live in worlds of second choice or no choice at all.

Through the lens of Daniel's experience in Babylon as well as contemporary stories and reflections, Viv Thomas explains that when our lives are dislocated wonderful things can happen. Second choice situations can become places of grace, community, imagination and maturity if we learn to embrace life as it is.