Choice Free Will and Sin

I do not believe that God afflicts us nor even that he unmercifully tries and tests us. It is the gift of choice itself that allows us to experience failure, and then strive for completion; to experience laziness and loss of faith and then strive for work and patience; to experience listlessness and strive for passion; to experience hurt in ourselves and the hurt we cause others and then strive to be a source of love and healing.

We choose again. We choose love and faith and passion and charity.  But then we get frustrated. We find out that the world is much bigger than us. We had decided to make good our gift of choice and we try and work and do good. But we get bogged down because there is more world than there is us. There is noise all around us, forces trying to make a sham of our loving deeds and fired up passions. And we give up. Or we decide to turn our energies elsewhere and try where there is not so much noise. ("I am on a path to let go", as we say to a lover.). And we collect baggage and think we simply are not in the place that merits our full energies and that we can not be the whole person we were meant to be in this place.

But if we are faithful to God and faithful to the love we committed to in His name we learn that the world is not bigger than God. That the light and love and passion and strength and thunderous force of God is bigger than anything we can even imagine. But the price we pay when we accept God into our lives is faith. Faith has a tremendous price. It means not only accepting God's bigness and drawing on His strength, it also means giving up our pride that we could change the world in our own fashion, and so it means going on in faith and believing that if we accept God's bigness, if we want his bigness, than He is also master. If we were master, God would by definition be very small, and so not really so helpful.

And faith in God means that the full embrace of life, is bearing a great deal. It means believing in what God has to give, not in what we appear to be getting from the world. It means loving love itself. Loving God Himself. Loving ourselves because He first loved us. Loving others because He first loved us. And scriptures are not easy when it comes to love. It is rewarding, it offers the full embrace of life. But there is much surrender. It is not easy to surrender ego and yet be a deeply loving soul. And yet, this is life's greatest challenge and greatest reward, it IS life's full embrace.

Original sin, first mentioned in Genesis when Cain killed Abel:  Because God liked Abel's gift more than he liked Cain's. And so Cain was hurt and angry and somehow thought that if God loved Cain, then there was not enough love left for him. This is original sin. The belief that we need to have all the love for ourselves and that ever being second place or not the one at that time focused on, means we should lash out, our worth is so insulted that we can find ourselves destroying another. Making choices that are not loving, that take away from others, because we ourselves do not feel that we have enough love for ourselves.

Love is difficult. Love is aided by passion, but love is not passion. Love is encouraged by response, but is not limited when response seems illusive. Love bears all things, believes all things, love never fails.

We have the gift of choice so we must be adventurous and get out there. Choice means we fail at times. To rise above our failure we must love God more than we love ourselves, yes we must love love itself.  Or we will be forever failing in our choices and forever trying somewhere else to love - collecting baggage. We will love, but not with the depth and heights we are capable of. With God we are capable. Love itself, never fails.

Discerning the voice of God from ego is also to be able to truly accept the gift of choice and the penalty of choice. Choice is choice, we are in a state of unknowing and have to take a risk, the adventure of life. We are not predestined along a set script, the players coming in and out of our lives by an unseen director. We choose. We ask for God's blessing on our choices. We commit. We ask for God's strength to bring our choices to maturity. We ask for God's guidance in our choices, and we do ask him to present us with opportunity and to help us recognize when we are in pivotal places for change and opportunity to grow closer to Him.

We choose. We commit. We try.
Choice means failure. We fail. We ask for God's guidance to help us admit our failure and bring our failure before others and before Him. We ask for the wisdom to know: the difference between letting go of evil and giving up;
the difference between giving up and allowing a Phoenix to rise form the ashes;
the time to backtrack , risking leaving others abandoned and bleeding in our wake, and the time to take our failures forward to a place of forgiveness and depth and healing we have never been before;
the difference between creating baggage and disillusionment and loss of faith in ourselves and those we have let down, and true faithfulness in the presence of challenge and opportunity for higher and higher planes of love.

Accepting the gift of choice is wonderful and painful. Perpetually staying at stage one of choice where actions are reversed, is not to understand that choice is a gift of paradox. Choice is great (yeah thanks God - I'm, still signing up for angel next time). Choice means we miss the bull's eye, we sin. Sin means pain. Pain means growth and even can allow a Pheonix to rise from the ashes. The generation before us created many of our friends and relatives in this way: Choice meant sex without clear commitment. My parents learned the meaning of faith and love. And I have a brother.
In faith and hope and love, we build on our imperfect, sinful choices. Not just on our stellar and angelic ones.