All week, my 11 year old has struggled with the concepts of Free Will and the Omnipotence of God.\u00a0 After all, he has repeatedly asked, how can it be free will if God already knows what we will do?\u00a0 I\u2019ve been struggling to explain it to him, as it\u2019s not something my human brain can easily understand.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been trying, and praying, and then praying about it some more.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yesterday, he explained it to himself as he watched me put the 4 year old down for his nap.<\/p>\n
\u201cI get the Free Will thing,\u201d he announced as he helped me wash the lunch dishes. \u201cIt\u2019s like when you put #5 down for a nap.\u00a0 You know he\u2019s going to get up and run around.\u00a0 You know he\u2019s going to play with toys, sing out loud, and get in trouble.\u00a0 You know he\u2019s going to do all those things before you even walk upstairs with him, don\u2019t you?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI do.\u201d I replied, waiting to see where we were headed with all of this.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou also know that he\u2019s going to run around at nap time and at night time, but you still keep putting him to bed the same way.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYup.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI used to do that, too, didn\u2019t I?\u00a0 The running around stuff?\u201d\u00a0 I nodded at him.\u00a0 \u201cBut you just kept putting it in front of me knowing that eventually I would learn how good sleep is and I would do what was right because I had learned from it.\u201d\u00a0 (I wish I were that calm, mostly it was the fatigue that made me walk away.)<\/p>\n
\u201cYou could make him stay in bed,\u201d my son continued. \u201cYou could tie him there and not let him out until you were ready for it, but he wouldn\u2019t learn about sleep and to listen to you, he would learn about being trapped and forced.\u00a0 That wouldn\u2019t be love, it would be power\u2026\u2026..God could force us, too.\u00a0 He could make us do what is right.\u00a0 He could control us like puppets and make us all behave perfectly, but that wouldn\u2019t be love either, it would be slavery.\u00a0\u00a0 He keeps putting the chance to do right in front of us and hoping we\u2019ll do the right thing but knowing that most of the time we\u2019re just going to run around crazy like #5, right? But He gives us the chance to learn from it, because love is letting you be free..isn\u2019t it?\u2026even free to be bad?\u201d<\/p>\n
I just hugged him, my mini-scholar.\u00a0 He gets things that baffle adults and makes them so simple in his childlike way\u2026..so easy that even his mom can understand them.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
All week, my 11 year old has struggled with the concepts of Free Will and the Omnipotence of God.\u00a0 After all, he has repeatedly asked, how can it be free will if God already knows what we will do?\u00a0 I\u2019ve been struggling to explain it to him, as it\u2019s not something my human brain can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1979,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n