A lot of the choices we make hinge on split second decisions. There are many times when making instantaneous decisions is not just appropriate but absolutely necessary. We don't want to be trapped in a long, drawn out internal debate about which items we would most like to save from a fire when the house is actually on fire, for instance. But for many of life's choices, there is that urgent feeling of crisis that we have exactly one second to make the choice, but it is only a feeling. The sense of urgency is largely artificial and arbitrary. Most of us get something like two to two and a half billion seconds in our lifetime. Is it really true that we don't have the luxury to take an extra few or even an extra few thousand seconds to make sure we are really doing our due diligence with our decision? The problem is that we have our eternal nature and our “second” nature, or in other words, the nature of measuring out time in seconds, and we get some of the values of these two natures mixed up. As children of God, the choices we make do have an impact not just in our time-bound lives but for all of eternity. But not all of our choices have eternal significance. If we wear the blue shirt or the red shirt today, there's not necessarily going to be a huge impact on the shape of our eternal destiny. But even for those bigger decisions that can affect the course of our lives, we still have access to repentance and Jesus Christ's Atonement. Whatever path we've gone down, we can always get back on track with the help of our Savior. Christ stands as the mediator between our eternal nature, which says that everything we do feeds into the structures, and our temporal or second nature, which says that this chance will be gone at the end of this second and we will never get it back and that opportunity will be lost forever. The essence of the test in which we are all participating as we live our lives is to be able to discern which options are important and which choices are urgent, and sometimes they're both and sometimes they're neither. As we rely on the Savior, He will help us to apply the proper heuristics stemming separately from our eternal and second natures so that we are never fooled into making split second bad decisions to sell our eternal birthrights for the instant gratification of a mess of pottage. I know that we all have an eternal nature and a second nature and we need both to operate in this world and we should be paying careful attention and, when appropriate and necessary, taking as many seconds as we need to arrive at the right decision.
