Do you think of free will as a gift from your creator? After all, isn’t everything you experience a gift from your creator? And what a huge grab bag of gifts it is! Your life, your sight, your hearing, your sense of smell, your taste, your sense of touch, your energy, your health, your body’s ability to heal itself - the list goes on and on.
Of course, some of these gifts you share with all of creation and all these gifts you share with the animal kingdom. But one gift is yours alone. Nothing else in creation has been given free will. Might the gift of free will be your greatest gift?
Free will gives you choice. It gives you a sense of power. It gives you autonomy. It gives you the satisfaction of experiencing the results of what you choose to do with your life. Nothing else in creation has been given such an amazing gift. Might it also be your most dangerous gift?
Could the sense of control and self-sufficiency, with which free will provides you, lull you into a false security. . Could a sense of independence, which free will provides, lead you subconsciously into a sense that you don't need your creator? Could the exhilaration and intoxication of free will distract you from what is most important in your life - discovering what your creator wants of you?
Can anyone other than your creator know its purpose in creating you? How can you discover that purpose? Might our experience as procreators give us a clue as to what our creator wants of us? Only a mother experiences the total procreation experience as the father's role is limited to fertilization. What can we learn, from mothers, about what our creator wants of us?
A loving mother’s love is selfless and unconditional. She never stops being a mother. She offers her child a lifetime of intimacy with her. She wants her child to choose to accept her offer and love her as she loves it. She knows, for that love to be real, it must be freely given. No matter how much she craves her child’s love, she is powerless to make it happen. By giving us free will, has our creator not left itself in the same situation?
Like the mother, our creator’s love is selfless and unconditional. It never stops loving us. It offers us eternal intimacy with it. It wants us to choose to accept its offer of eternal intimacy with it and to love it as it loves us. It knows, for that love to be real, it must be freely given by us. No matter how much it craves our love, it made itself powerless to make it happen by giving us free will. Only we can enable the eternal intimacy that our creator wants so badly and which is the meaning of our lives.
Sadly, the more gifted we are the more we feel we have everything we need. We feel we are self-sufficient. The love we are blessed with, the possessions we acquire, the riches we amass, the security we feel all fool us into thinking that our needs are already fulfilled. Have you ever thought that your success in life is the most dangerous thing you can experience?
The only way out of this danger is to recognize it and choose to avoid it. It’s up to us to choose to respond to our creator’s constant outreach to us. But how can we respond if we can’t see, hear or sense our creator? You'll find some deep thinking about this question at Why Our Creator Keeps Itself Hidden From Us and Is Your Creator Awaiting a Response to its Constant Outreach?
Del H. Smith conducts research into life’s meaning and is the award-winning author of the AMAZON Best Seller, Discovering Life’s Purpose.