The True Image of Freedom
Continuing the Conversation…
God’s Willingness to Bear the Pain of our Free Will
“He wants us…to love him, and if our love is to be spontaneous and real, we must be free also not to love him with all its grim consequences of human suffering. Evil exists in the world not because God is indifferent or powerless or absent but because man is free, and free he must be if he is to love freely, free he must be if he is to be human”
I’m amazed that God allows humankind's weak-willed and self-oriented creatures, like me, the freedom to choose our allegiances, behaviors, and loves. We don’t even trust ourselves—evidenced by law enforcement and the Constitution. I can’t even stick to a diet for my own benefit. Yet, God places a life to live and a world to manage in our hands. What a tremendous expression of self-sacrificing love.
God lets us make a mess of our lives, if we choose, and he bears the sadness of our choice. And when the mess we make ricochets through life like a wrecking ball inside a pinball machine, he continues to preserve the dignity of the human will. He does not interfere, though he grieves for our pain and watches the earth decay. Collateral damage spreads wide and he still respects our freedom. To intervene in our decisions, even when consequences multiply into disease, war, and famine, would take from us what makes us human.
Considering this, what if we respond to suffering differently? Instead of decrying God’s failure to prevent suffering, we heed the warnings of misuse and worse damage to come. Rather than accusing God of apathy for failure to act at every tragedy, natural disaster, or mass crime, we recognize our desperate need to return to his guidance and care. Pain speaks loudly but let us hear clearly.
Suffering displays evidence of a self-sacrificing God willing to bear our abuses to offer us the highest of loves. He patiently waits for the sting of those abuses to turn us to his invitation to flourish instead of spiraling toward destruction. In the meantime, he feels each lash of senseless waste, each stab of rejection, every insult to his Name; yet he is longsuffering because he knows what is at stake. He chooses to endure the suffering because those he loves are suffering.
We grieve tragedy, as we should, for those made in the image of a good God. But what if we also grab onto the mercy in the message to choose the better way? What if we lunge past the weeping into the embrace of a God willing to take the pain of our humanness upon himself—for love of us?
What suffering in your life can you place in God’s hands to bear with you?
Quote Reference: Frederick Buechner, The Faces of Jesus: A Life Story, (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2014), 28-29.