Recently at church someone spoke about the love God has for each individual. She mentioned these lines from the For King and Country song God Only Knows, "There's a kind of love that God only knows."
She had been praying to make some really hard choices that affected not only herself but also her children. She begged God to give her the answer, tell her what to do. God didn't tell her what to do. God let her make the decision and then afterwards confirmed it was the correct decision. God's love for her in the moment was to let her choose. It's a love that only God fully knows- agency.
As a parent, we wish we could make our children's lives easy and perfect, so good that they will be outstanding adults. The reality is that our children, everyone really, needs to learn to make good choices which will inevitably lead to them making some bad choices, sometimes continually bad choices. Some things you can learn very well from other people's mistakes. Other things are best learned by making your own mistakes.
Many people call it 'free' agency but that term is misleading. We are free to use our agency, but agency isn't free, it has consequences attached, natural and human-made.
When I worked at a junior high, one girl made the often hear comment, "It's a free country, I can do whatever I want." She wanted free agency, agency without consequences. She wanted to be able to hit people without consequences because she has free agency. I tried to explain that while she was free to choose to hit people, she wasn't free from the consequences- just plain agency.
We live together with people and that naturally comes with compromises. We promise to use our agency wisely and for the benefit of the community in exchange for safety, trade, and socialization. When we use our agency to hurt others, we get the natural and community-made consequences. If you want agency with no human-made consequences, that requires being alone.
God wants us to return to a perfect heaven so much that a plan was made in which Jesus volunteered to become our Savior, to allow us to choose to come back home or not. God allowed perfect heartbreak in the atonement because of a love God only knows (John 3:16). God gives us our agency to return to our heavenly home and heavenly family because of a special love. God won't force us to return despite the pain of children's rejection and allows us to choose a special love to return to our heavenly home. Our agency is a kind of love that God only knows.
No comments:
Post a Comment