The God-given Power to Choose
Indulge me for a moment, and let me know if this line of reasoning makes sense.
God is the creator of the universe. He created everything that is – EVERYTHING. As such, it could be said that ‘He is the center of the universe’.
We are one of His creations. Just one of an infinite number of creations. Sometimes we may think that we’re insignificant when considering the endless quantity and vastness of His creations. But nothing could be further than the truth. As His children, we are not only one of His creations, we happen to be His crowing creation! We are the one creation that He loves the most, the one that He is most invested in, and the one He is most concerned about succeeding and eventually returning to Him.
All of God’s creations are a tribute to Him, to His majesty, and His magnificence, to His intelligence, to His passion to create, and to His Glory.
Unique among His creations, His children (us) have been given the gift of agency. We alone, of all of His creations have been endowed with the ability to choose for ourselves.
The sun doesn’t choose to give light. The stars don’t choose to twinkle. Flowers don’t choose to bloom. Rivers don’t chose to flow downhill. Trees don’t choose to have their leaves change colors in the fall. Robins don’t choose to fly. All of God’s creations do what they were created to do. They do it beautifully. They do it obediently. And they do it because their Creator made them so. They instinctively and perfectly obey His will, and as they do, they flawlessly fulfill the purpose and the measure of their creation. But they don’t have a choice.
Our choices not only set us apart from the rest of God’s creations, they allow us great possibilities and unlimited potential – possibilities and potential unknown and unavailable to all other creations! Of all of God’s creations, from one end of the universe to the other, from microscopic organisms to blue whales, from the mustard seed to the giant sequoia, from star dust to the sun, we are the ONLY creation God gave the privilege of choice!
Only mankind can choose to be happy or sad, good or evil, kind or cruel, to accomplish or to be idle, to build or to destroy, to have empathy or disdain, to dance in the rain or to agonize through the storm, to plant or to pluck, to speak or to listen, to respect or criticize, to get out of bed or to sleep in, to love or to hate, to make a friend or to antagonize, to worship or to disregard, to be optimistic or pessimistic, to have hope or desperation, to be encouraging or discouraging, to be cheerful or depressed, to feel happy or miserable, to experience the spectrum of emotions, to create, to learn… to choose! It’s not always a clear black or white issue, but the point is that God allows us the privilege of making our own choices. And the incredible beauty of that privilege is both humbling and at the same time breathtaking.
God giving His children the agency to choose tells us a few things about Him. It tells us He loves us and trusts us. What an amazing thing to know. It tells us that He wants us to take part in the process of determining who we are and who we can become! Again, amazing to me. It tells us that our ultimate end will in-part be determined by the choices we make – we have a say in what our lives are like and what they can become. It tells us that we can learn from our mistakes, learn from others, and learn to be better with every new choice. It tells us that our choices have significance, they’re meaningful, and that we should have reverence about the choices placed before us. God must really, really love us to give us this wonderful gift of agency!
It is by our choices, how we use this gift of agency, that we can show our true reverence and ultimate respect for our Father in Heaven. It is through our good choices that we can bring glory to Him and glorify Him. Our good choices, and learning from the not-so-good choices can be a way to express our gratitude for Him, for all things, and especially for His celestial gift of choice.
Choosing love,
Wm. Calvin Hughes
Lake Elsinore, California
#sharegoodness
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J.J., a friend replied -Ok, so He allows us to choose--I wonder how often he allows the natural consequence of our choice to be played out and how often he intervenes. And thus, because I continually day by day try to be more like him, how often should I intervene in the life of one of His children?
I love what you have wrote, this is the hypothetical question it brings to me. I'm guessing, because we're all unique, we just have to continually seek His guidance. That there is no cut and dry answer.
Great comments J.J.. Here was my reply back -JJ, my personal thoughts are that God let's the natural consequences happen the majority of the time. A great thing about mortality is that whatever our choices in any given situation, we can still learn and grow. Some learning is harder than other learning, and some is harder because of the choices we make.
My thought is that in reality, it's pretty hard to take away someone else's agency. Even people serving lifetime prison sentences still have choices about what and how they think and feel. They can choose to be happy and productive or miserable and destructive.
I'm reminded of great people that chose the better path, the high road, even in the midst of incredible persecution and oppression - like Victor Frankl and Anne Frank and Job of the Old Testament. They've showed that even in the midst of horrendous storms of incredible persecution, they still had agency to choose. And they used it, to their credit, and to our benefit, to choose goodness.
To me there is a difference between intervening and influencing. God tries to use His influence to bless us and help us grow and learn. He uses the Light if Christ, the Holy Ghost, patriarchal blessings, scriptures and Prophets. He even uses our parents and family and friends to influence us, to bless us, and to help us make good choices.
Likewise, as parents we do similarly with our children. We try to influence them for good through a myriad of ways. But when all is said and done, we (and our children) still get to choose how to react and what we're going to do. To obey, or not to obey? - that is the ultimate question.
And the consequences of the choices we make will follow, as natural and predictable as morning follows night. And (repeating myself here) the miraculous part of God's plan is that regardless of our choices, He can use the consequences to still bless us. It's no wonder that one of His titles is 'Love'. In fact, it is precisely out of love that He doesn't intervene. If we could see things like He sees them, we'd probably insist that He not intervene most of the time.
Anyway, those are my thoughts... Don't know if I'm on the right track or not... just thinking out loud. What do you think?
