Wrestling With Hard Topics: Free Will and God’s Will

Because spiritual abuse is part of my history, my relationship with God has been difficult. It took me quite a while to separate God from the people who damaged my heart. Currently, I do not see very many healthy churches and being a part of one that is doing marginally well seems like a step that may never come for me personally. And reading scripture is only tolerated in spurts. Reading about Jesus helps the most. I do find that I pray a lot more and is usually in my head, more like a thought aimed at God rather than a request spelled out. That has come to feel like an awareness of the indwelling Holy Spirit, a constant companion and protector of my soul. It took a long time to trust in that experience.

It also took a great deal of time to see who God really is. To separate doctrine from relationship. I think when people suffer one of the most common questions is why. And the next question is how a good God can allow it.

Our Creator is love. When Jesus walked the earth he had the privilege of embodying this for anyone who would take pause to see it. Allowing bad does not make God bad. To be a loving God, we had to have free will. Besides Christ’s atonement, I think this is the greatest thing that was given to us. With free will comes our own failures and messes and these things cause fall-out. And there are people who choose to just do the wrong thing. But, the point is, we all have the choice.

In suffering, we can learn to find joy. We can learn to find meaning. We can deepen love in our lives. In suffering we face ourselves and find out who we really are. Everyday, regular life just doesn’t get us there. Christ, in his perfection, still suffered. Buddhists believe this is one of the four noble truths. It is part of the “human condition.” No one has a perfect life, free from suffering.

Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor, developed logotherapy and wrote about it in “Man’s Search For Meaning.” This is basically searching our challenges and suffering to make sense of it. And sometimes, there is not logical sense to find, but there are many other things that can be discovered along the way. We find our resilience. We find our humor. We find our deepest grief and in surviving it, we can go on to see someone else through it. I was reminded today of Frankl’s story. When he was in a camp, along with many other prisoners, they were taken to be executed. The guard’s last kill was the man beside him before the executioner ran out of bullets.

These are the very moments that point us back to a creator. We may never know the why, but Viktor went on to change the way people learn to heal. Maybe he would not agree that his greatest purpose was to live through World War II to contribute to society and leave an incredible legacy for humanity. But, it is an undeniably altering experience and he created from it. Isn’t there some connection then, to the creator, when we create?

And again free will comes into play. Frankl could have easily given up, resigned himself to the evil that he was surrounded by every day. And yet, he refused to let go of the good. Where does that come from? In my own life, it is a well-spring from God directly. There are moments in my life where nothing made sense, but I still could not give up.

For me, I have come to peace with the belief that I will not know why I endured the things that happened to me. They brought me to the depth of my inner self and it grew my trust in God when nothing else did. I want to say here that I turned everywhere else. I made some really poor decisions in the process. In no way do I feel or see how God caused any of it.

If you are at this roadblock, that is totally ok. I wish I had felt more protected, but that seems like wishing I would simply be plucked out of my situation. I do wish I didn’t have to go through so much more pain before I found my path to healing. But, I know there was not a better route for me to take. I saw God OFTEN and CLEARLY revealed in my worst suffering. Because of their sovereignty, they knew how I had to learn. I could not have self-prescribed all that was required of me to get to today.

The second thing that isn’t so resolved for me is God's will. How do I know what that is? How do I follow it? What if it conflicts with my will?

What I have to keep in mind when I struggle with this is that God’s will cannot be equated to my will. I have a small picture of things. I am short-sighted and so very fallible. God sees and knows my heart better than I do. So, if a desire comes I believe I need to evaluate the possibility that God put it there.

When examining this subject, I also have to remind myself that I will get nowhere if I am not in motion. While God is firstly relational, they are not a magician, they do not remove suffering, although it can be eased for us; we can be comforted, guided and taught through it. Expectations of my own needs and desires and what God delivers often looks very different.

But, I have yet to experience that where after all my thorough planning, God didn’t come up with something far better and added things I hadn’t even thought of.

Here is the toughest part of God's will versus my will. First of all, it isn’t a competition. How could I possibly outdo God? And yet, my pride or false beliefs put me in that position sometimes to argue and rebel and do it MY way. Second, often obedience comes into play. Usually when I don’t understand why a particular thing is being asked of me. That is the moment to take the direction given to me.

I used to find God's will scary. The God of the Old Testament seemed harsh and even cruel at times. Until I read over and over and over, the opportunities that were given to the Jews who were clearly identified as the chosen group before Christ. They did what they wanted to over and over and over, sometimes to their own deaths rather than following God's good and loving way. Also, do not make the mistake of believing that God has everything planned out, so what we do never really matters.

While this post isn't particularly about educating you and doesn’t really have a lot of answers, these are things that I continue to learn through. In a Christian walk, I imagine they show up quite a bit regardless of your experiences, theological education, background, ethnicity, race, color, or gender. And it is one of the hardest journeys when we come to the end of ourselves and have to figure out a way to continue on. Alone is never ideal.

There is a duality of this vital dynamic to finding our wholeness, two sides of the same coin- my free will and God’s will. Embracing our free will without attaching strings of explanation from God is freeing. I stopped being obsessed with the why and started learning how to take responsibility for my life. Free will looks like cultivating boundaries and choosing how I invest in my overall wellness and it makes me examine my choices oh-so-much-more carefully. Being obedient in God’s will is an exercise of faith because I truly believe God does not harm us. I have done that for myself all too well in the past.

Reach out to other people who are healing, too. Seek out God and learn about what has been done already for you and how God reveals their being again and again. How does knowing God help your healing? Talk about these hard things. Pray for revelation and lean in hard because there is nothing God wants more than for us to live in a way that shows we mutually and deeply know one another.