The Cost of Freedom

It happened on a Friday, last Friday, in the wee small hours of the morning.  The man drove to the theater, came in through the back, walked into one of the many theaters and open fired on over 200 people.  Men, women, and children injured both physically, mentally and emotionally and twelve innocent souls dead.  What would possess someone to do something so heinous and so seemingly random?  and the question on everyone's mind whether Christian or not is, How could God let this happen?  Its where we always go first.  Christians hold onto the belief that God is ultimately in control but He is sovereign while those without belief simply cannot grasp a God who could be in control and loving and yet allow something like this to happen.  It's a legitimate question.

Now, I am not here today to start a theological debate on the timeless question of "If God is good why do bad things happen."  I want to talk about you and me and this thing called freedom.  I don't want to know why God let this happen, I want to know, WHY DID WE?

History is filled with men and women fighting for freedom.  Freedom from oppression and tyranny, freedom of speech and expression, freedom to love who you love and worship who you want to worship.  All of these freedoms, however, stem from the ultimate freedom of man, FREE WILL.   God created us in His image, and blessed us with this beautiful thing called free will. Free will is the ability to choose, the genuine personal ability to choose right or choose wrong and experience the actual consequences of the choices.  It was a gift that we didn't have to fight for and yet when bad things happen and people exercise their free will, we get angry and blame God.  How could You? How could You give us the very thing we want and then let us deal with our consequences?

Do you hear it?  We blame God and yet we are the problem.  We want the freedom to make choices and yet we want to blame Him for giving us the very thing we asked for?  God didn't fail here, we did.

We let hate be a freedom of expression, we let fear be a motive for change, we let death and destruction be an avenue of entertainment, we let anger and malice be our attempt at peace.  How can we be so arrogant to point our fingers at God who is weeping because one of His beloved creations made a choice given freely to Him? How can we throw our arms and words around fighting to be free and have what we want and then feel failed because God gave us what we wanted?

We paid a great price for our freedom last Friday.  We failed and it's time we quit failing.