Free Will, Day 75

Lately I’ve been wanting to eat as badly as possible. I am mostly lazy, not wanting to clean or attend to anything. And my will power for not spending money has been breaking. I go through stages. For weeks I will be strong and mighty, able to resist any temptation as if it were a nat. Then the weeks will arrive when I feel like a puddle of mud, not an ounce of strength in me, just yuck and muck and other bad stuff.

Several years ago you’d have heard me say quite often, “why did God give us this free will crap?” I’d often wish He would just make me be good, make me do good, take the me out of the picture and leave just a perfectly good Michal. And then at one point in time, actually I remember it quite vividly. It was during April 2007 the second year that I went to Guatemala. I was reading in the first few chapters of Genesis every morning while I was there. One morning I was asking God my usual question, “why did you give us this free will crap anyways?” I spiced it up a little with, “You know, you just shouldn’t have put that stupid tree in the garden!” And then it hit me: without free will, without the ability to choose wrong or right there is no love. Love is selfless, it is beautiful and wonderful, but it is also very much a choice. It’s quite possibly the most important choice any of us makes all throughout the entirety of every single day. If we didn’t have free will then we could not love. God created us, I believe, so that He could love us and He adamantly desires that we also love Him. But it’s our choice.

I’m glad I’ve been given that choice. I can say that for all my weakness, and all my snarling, for all my forgetting that God desires for me to talk to Him and share my heart with Him, I do love Him. I’m glad that I can make the decision to spend time before Him. I’m glad that I can make the decision to recognize the beauty and blessing He’s showered upon my life. I’m glad that I can make the choice to live my life for Him the way He sees best, the way His heart desires. I’m glad that I can choose to thank Him for the gifts He gives me, to show my gratitude for His love. Even though sometimes I really REALLY want to make the wrong choices (and of course regularly do) I am glad that I’ve been given the choice.

If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata – of creatures that worked like machines – would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is that happiness of being freely, VOLUNTARILY united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight…
- C.S. Lewis