It is a basic need to have a voice; an opinion and the freedom to make one’s own choice. While those who are deprived may not appreciate such a concern, taking away such a freedom from those who have been accustomed to it is akin to taking away something ‘Essentially Human’ from them. May the human spirit prevail against the desire to control or quench it.
Sometimes, as an insensitive and overbearing parent, I would ask my son which bag he would like and eventually overrode his choice. ‘Blue is better, green is so awful.’ Ask him which school he wants to be enrolled into though I had made up my mind. ‘You can only choose what I allow you to choose.’ Despite our best interest, as the child grows up, he needs to make his own choice and learns of its consequence.
God did not create us to behave like robots. He gives us a choice; to choose between good and evil, to choose Him or another. Can you imagine someone who has never made a choice in his entire life? What kind of a person will he be? I used to ponder why Adam and Eve chose to eat from the tree God told them not to. How hard can it be to avoid eating from a single tree when there are so many others? But I realised that I am very much in a similar situation. The choice is always there to choose something that God disapproves; it is a daily battle to wake up and choose what is ‘good’, to avoid my ‘Tree of the knowledge of good and evil’.
However, there is something indescribably beautiful when one makes a difficult choice. “I choose Daddy over anything you can give me” and I think that is what God desires more than anything else.
‘Does the LORD delight in burnt offering and sacrifices as much as obeying the LORD? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams.’
Simple Thoughts 