Prevention plan

So it seems that a key part of my plan for emotional health is seeing the kind of effects that the choices I could make - that I sometimes still want to make - have when others do make them. (RW)

I read a poignant blog post yesterday that a good friend pointed me to. The things I read that impress me most are always those that spur my own thoughts along the lines of further reflection, and that was true of this person's post. Please: I hope no one misconstrues my own reflection as somehow being being critical of what they've written from their heart; I'm just responding from my own thoughts, struggles and feelings, inspired by the author's sharing.

"The opposite of love is freedom." What a paradox, because there can be no love without freedom. This is why God has blessed us with free will, I suppose, even knowing that would mean that we would use it in hurtful and destructive ways, seeing all the choices that we would make with it and knowing that, somehow, there is no way for us to have the freedom to make harmful choices without the actuality that we sometimes will. There is no freedom to love without also the freedom to not love. Yet it is also true that we cannot choose to love without also sacrificing or subordinating our freedom, or rather, freely choosing to apply it in ways that we would never choose except for love. For instance, all-powerful God himself restricts his own power and freedom for the sake of loving us and bestowing upon us the gift of our freedom, without which we could never love God in return, which is the greatest thing we might ever aspire to do.  All other good that we hope for is rooted in our willingness to likewise sacrifice the freedom that God has bestowed on us so that we might know the glory of loving others and loving God in return.

The truth is that sometimes I'd rather be free to do as I want, and what I want is not to love as God has called me - er, as God has first loved me. For me, the biggest thing that I long to be free of is the pain of my past failures to love. This is a silly circle of reasoning, of course, because there could be no greater failure to love than to simply choose not to be anymore, and that is the only way to be completely free from that particular heartache.

As I started typing this post, my desktop slideshow served me up this picture from our 2013 visit with our daughter's family. The botanical garden at Waimea Falls delivered a smorgasbord (hmm, I just noticed an anagram of the first seven letters of that word; can't believe I've never seen that before - sorry) of floral beauty, each bloom a testimony to the intricate wonder of creation. We've seen countless large-scale majesties, as well, all of which serve as testimony to our God who didn't need any of this, was entirely sufficient all by God's trinitarian self, and expressed all of this and each of us into existence simply because God is love and love gives love's-self. And we have encountered the poignant touch of love in wondrous and heartrending ways. I keep thinking that I want to be more like God, but at such times I usually perceive that to mean being more in control of how I think the world ought to run. God's way of being God is more like my way of being me ought to be: to grant the world and those around me the freedom to choose to love, and to keep loving them whatever their choices may actually be.

So it's true that the opposite of love is freedom, and yet it is also true that the fulfillment of love is freedom expressed in a completely different way from how we usually think of freedom and of love.