Freedom

Welcome to part two of my reflection on values that I hold. Hope that its making you think and come to some deeper understandings. 
While we are made I the image and likeness of God we also have human freedom to choice and make our own choices. It is part of what sets us apart from other creatures; as humans we are the ability to look at situations and problems internally. When I am dealing with an issues or a choice I have to make, I can use reason that is within me to make this decision. While animals’ base all choices in survival. They do not deliberate and then decide to turn away. By contrast, we are able to formulate the thought: I don’t want to be the kind of person who does such-and-such. We can be motivated by such thoughts. We not only make choices; we evaluate our choices regardless of whether our evaluations are themselves caused by forces behind our control or not.

This is something that we grow into as we get older, for me this was something that I have grown into over the past ten years. Once I moved away from home and started to be able to make all my own choices, I had grown into a lot more human freedom, however had to grow more into questions and looking at decisions, using reasoning that is also part of the human freedom took longer to develop and happened after making bad decisions that didn’t reflect the person I wanted to be.  Human freedom is the unique ability, to reflect on and evaluate our desires and to choose one course of action over another, at this part of human freedom is the one where we need to make sure we are connected and reflecting.

From this point being spiritually free means to allow the movement of the Spirit to work through my freedom to help guide me and help me see what path I am meant to take in my human journey. In our lives there are always a number of areas we want to stay in control off. However for me I can note a number where my control of the situation isn’t coming from a place of following what I know is true, it comes from a place of fear to let go.

Human freedom is an ability. It is the unique ability, made possible by reflecting on and evaluate our desires and to choose one course of action over another. Only once I was able to accept this, I was then ability connect this to being morally responsible for what I take part in. This is where being connected to our spiritual freedom is so important to me. I very involved in social justice and it comes from this place of realizing that my freedom gives me also the ability to see and help those in need and work on creating more justice systems around us. This for me is the importance of moral responsibility and spiritual freedom, in our lives as moral beings, in our social practices including what we do daily and what we ignore.

With freedom however also come the chance to make mistakes, which I have done throughout my life. Because we make our own choices we can choice to move in a bad direction and at times we fall and we suffer. While not all suffering is our own doing, how we react and look at suffering is also effected by our faith. Christian believes that no suffering is ultimately meaningless or pointless. God always has a good purpose in allowing suffering, even when that purpose is inscrutable to us. We always have a choice in our suffering, whether to trust God as our loving Father, and receive the good gift that He is giving us, or to rail against God in distrust and anger.

For me I have seen both sides of this, there were many times especially after the death of my mother that I was so anger with God I couldn’t see how anything good could coming into being through my suffering. I also couldn’t see where God was in what was happening. However after the suffering was over, I was able to come to a deeper understanding of where God was even in my darkest moments.