Free will

The brother of a person I know died in a car accident yesterday, leaving behind a wife and child. At times like these people tend to either reach out to God, or get mad at God. "Why did God do this?", or "Why did God let this happen?".

Unfortunately God is not in control of everything. Blasphemy? No. Truth. Many people believe that God is in control of everything. It helps keep them sane. Gives them comfort. The truth is, God is in control of what you let him control. That is how he set it up. We have free will. Us having free will (the will to make the choices we want to make) is at odds with God being in total control of everything.

Our relationship as parents with our children is analogous to God's relationship with us, to some degree. As our kids get older and older, they get more and more "free will". The ability to make their own choices. When they are very little, we don't let them leave the yard. No matter how much they want to. As they get older, they get the ability to go places, drive, etc. Now if we never let them out of the yard, they'd never get in trouble - or at least get in a lot less trouble. But they also would have no free will.

I have no clue how this person died, and this post really has nothing to do with that... other than it made me think about people's relationships with God and how people tend to blame God when bad things happen. Bad things happen because there is a devil who loves to see them happen, and because sometimes we as people just mess things up. But why would such a wise and loving God set up such a system? Why would he have given up such control? Why didn't He keep control and keep us safer? The same reason we let our children grow up and move out. Because we love them. Because we want them to love us (based on their own free-will choices) and we want to see them grow up to be loving, producing, awesome adults. We don't want slaves. And neither did God.

So... He loved us enough to trust we'd do the right thing the majority of the time, that we'd love Him back, and He gave us the ability to do that... or to mess up our lives and the lives of those around us. And most of the time we don't want to accept that and take responsibility. We want to blame Him. But His only fault in this is that He loved us enough to give us free will and be responsible for our own actions.