Our destiny is not determined for us, but it is determined by us. Man’s free will is part of God’s sovereign will. We have freedom to take which course we choose, but not freedom to determine the end of that choice. God makes clear what he desires, we must choose, and the result of the choice is not the inevitableness of law, but the inevitableness of God.
~Oswald Chambers (1874-1917)
~Oswald Chambers (1874-1917)
I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying his voice and holding fast to him, for he is your life and length of days, that you may dwell in the land that the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.”
~ Deuteronomy 30:19-20
Oh wow, how we deify choice in our society! However, before we point the finger too pointedly at someone else, might we honestly answer how we esteem choice in our own lives?
If we get honest, we realize that we want what we want – when we want it. Period.
We seem to think that if we get what we want, if we have enough things to choose from in our possession, if we create options for ourselves – that we will gain freedom. But there is a paradox in any given system (including the universe). As each variable is introduced, complexity increases geometrically. And this complexity actually (sometimes very quickly) begins to limit freedom of movement in that system. A simple way of looking at this is to put ping-pong balls in a jar. If we put just a few ping-pong balls in the jar, they can move around freely within the container. But, if we fill the jar with ping-pong balls, none of them can move very easily.
To make the balls able to move, one must remove some of them. The system has to be simplified to allow for movement.
This simple model scales perfectly in our lives. We add all sorts of stuff to our lives, believing that we are creating a convenient environment. And it works for a little bit. However, we quickly find that the items we had acquired to create convenience, now serve to get in the way of our daily lives. We begin to actually swim in the stuff that was originally designed to set us free into the open air of life.
The scaling doesn’t end in only the practical. As we add choices to our lives, we quickly scale the complexity until we back ourselves into little corners. We over-commit. Or we under-commit (actually making too many choices to not move into life).
What to do?
Stop.
Yeah, really. Just stop trying to make any choices that are designed to fix one’s own life. Stop doing things just because we like them. Stop trying to make other things stop. Stop trying to get things started.
What in the world is this silly blogger talking about?
He is talking about the need for us to begin to align with a single Source for all of our decisions. For our lives to work correctly, we actually have to yield even the right to develop our own solutions to our problems. Any efforts made from our own limited perspective are almost guaranteed to created unintended consequences. It does not matter how much planning we do before we make our own choices, our vision is so limited that anything we do is simply like arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
We have got to back up and look to the Source for our cue on how to live, and then let our lives be a cooperative response to the decisions He has already made about the universe and each of us individually. This is the only path to freedom in life. Surely, this approach is counter-intuitive. Our self-esteem is ever so strong! We really do think that anything we come up with, must be right. Regardless, truth and time are dear friends. And the Word of G_d tells us clearly that we must seek Him first, that we must love Him with everything we are – or it just doesn’t work.
So, here is the test. Start actually making less choices about life, and focusing on one thing: Him. Do this earnestly and ask G_d to help you with this exercise. Do this for some reasonably extensive period of time, and then let this writer know how things went. Some of us may be in for a surprise!
See, He tells us that His yoke is easy, and that His burden is light. As we shed all the ballast we used to carry in life. As we stop stepping on our own shoelaces in our short-sighted plodding, we begin to move in the freedom for which He has already set us free.
Come on. i triple-dog dare you! Let go of the baggage. Just go run and play with Him for a while. You might just not want to ever come back to this life of drudgery.
So, here is the test. Start actually making less choices about life, and focusing on one thing: Him. Do this earnestly and ask G_d to help you with this exercise. Do this for some reasonably extensive period of time, and then let this writer know how things went. Some of us may be in for a surprise!
See, He tells us that His yoke is easy, and that His burden is light. As we shed all the ballast we used to carry in life. As we stop stepping on our own shoelaces in our short-sighted plodding, we begin to move in the freedom for which He has already set us free.
Come on. i triple-dog dare you! Let go of the baggage. Just go run and play with Him for a while. You might just not want to ever come back to this life of drudgery.
