Essay number sixteen: by The Midnight Writer

Free Will

If God exists, and I firmly believe God does exist, then why did God burden us with free will?

With common sense the answer not only becomes simple, it becomes obvious. Free will is not a burden; it is one of God’s greatest gifts. It only becomes a burden when we make the wrong choices.

To understand the power of this gift, place yourself in God’s position and imagine creating life so that you will never be along again. You have drifted through space for an untold amount of time all alone and you desire companionship. Someone to talk with and walk with and share experiences with that could give meaning to your existence.

You decide to build a universe with stars and planets where you can grow life forms. Your early experiments create life forms that are interesting and fascinating to watch but the interaction is limited. It becomes apparent that a true interaction will require you to create a life form that is aware of your existence and can share some of your godly attributes.

In order to release the loneliness in your heart it becomes necessary to do more than just create a life form to love. You have to create a life form that can give love back to you at the same level. The more you think about the possibility of giving godly attributes to a human form the more you realize the perils involved. As God you have existed for all time and have complete control of all the powers within you but what will happen if you give some of that power to a new life form that must learn how to manage it properly?

You discover that you cannot give the power to love without exposing the new life to the power of hate. You cannot give joy without exposing them to sorrow. You cannot give pleasure without exposing them to pain. The new life that you desperately want to create for companionship cannot be created without exposing them to the dark side of the godly powers that you would need to share with them. All of your experimenting proves that if the companionship you desire is to be created you must expose your new creation to free will. In simple terms, when you created light you exposed the universe to the dark side.

The companionship of many of your new life forms will be realized quickly. Many others will choose the darker forces and become lost along the way. But in your infinite wisdom you can see the time when all will master the forces and turn away from the dark side. The day will come when they master their powers and can join you without fear. The growing pains will be enormous and the suffering will seem unbearable at the time but the end result will make all of the suffering worthwhile. A woman can spend nine months suffering and then experience the pain of childbirth, and yet rejoice beyond belief with the gift of her child. So we will all rejoice, through our own free will, when we turn away from the dark side of our existence and embrace the light.
Stop externalizing these forces. The forces of God and the forces of the dark side exist within you at all times. God and Satin exist. Satin is not an opposing God. God is all that ever was, is or ever will be. The character of Satin is just the dark side of our own true self. God cannot murder Satin. Jesus could not murder Satin. But they did strip Satin of all of his power over them by declaring, “Satin, get thee behind me”. We must, through our own free will, make that same declaration.

Every day we should give thanks for the gift of free will. We should seek God’s guidance as we seek to embrace the light and turn our backs on the dark side. Only then will we be able to master the attributes that God has given us, one soul at a time, and bring God’s will to earth as it is in Heaven.

The Master’s Plan will come to fruition. Nothing can stop that day from coming. It may be next year or it may be a thousand years from now. God cannot tell us when that day is coming. He placed that decision in our hands.

Although we must all strive to help each other we should consider our personal growth above the collective. I must learn to remove the plank from my own eye before I can effectively help remove a splinter from yours. The greatest tools for mastering our godly attributes lie within us. Through free will we need to seek these tools and learn to turn our backs on the dark side of our human nature. The more we seek this path the stronger we will become. The stronger we become, the faster we will grow and the sooner the Master’s Plan will unfold.

The time has come for us to stop procrastinating, stop blaming others for our shortcomings, stop complaining about our pains and problems and stop thinking of ourselves as victims. Seek to overcome the dark side of your personality and become all that God intended for you to be. Even through all of the adversities, the rewards will make the struggle worthwhile.

Change is a personal journey. You are wasting your time trying to change others when your focus should be upon yourself. As you change you will, by word and deed, influence others. Your change will affect all others whether you intend to or not. This is a beautiful reward attached to us by the Master’s Plan. This is what Jesus referred to when he stated, “What you do to the least among you, you do unto me”.

Know that by exercising your free will to improve your god given attributes you will strengthen your ability to effect a positive change on the entire world and not just those with whom you come into contact. The power of one soul that has turned away from the dark side is beyond our imagination.

Get to work!