KS&L 382 It's Just God's Will by Tina Erwin

         Recently someone mentioned to me that life is pretty much what happens when you are making other plans. But then those ‘other plans’ are just God’s will after all and that ultimately there is nothing that we can do about it.

         Really? What happened to free will?

         So, here’s the question:

         Are the things that happen God’s Will or the Free Will of the individual?

         Yes, things happen and we have free will in how we handle them, how we adjust. It's the point of free will. If we are left thinking that it is God’s will that horrible things happen then what’s the point of ever trying to improve things or make a difference?

          Lets look at an example.

         What if someone we love dies as a result of that person being in a car with a drunk driver. Our loved one made a conscious choice to get in that car. Perhaps he or she didn’t make a decision to die that night but they did choose to accept the risk of death that getting in the car would engender. This isn’t God’s will it is free will.

         Our family can go to pieces at the death of this person or our family can work diligently to heal. Which is God’s Will: healing or hurting?  But then ‘will’ implies a directed outcome, so why would God insist we hurt? Isn’t God helping us heal? Yes and no. We have a choice in how we heal any catastrophic event in our lives. We can rise to the karmic opportunity presented, and embrace our grief, pain, and suffering, or we can retreat from life and martyr ourselves for the rest of our lives. We make that choice, God doesn’t. However, if we choose to heal, God will help us find a teacher who can help guide our way to insight and understanding when we ask Him for help.

         But if it is true, that God wants us to heal, why does it hurt so much when we lose someone? It hurts because we have massive connecting ties to people we love and when those ties are broken, they come recoiling back to us and it is endlessly painful. But it doesn’t have to be painful forever. In this example we each have a choice in how we respond to any event. We can choose to heal it or to allow pain to direct our lives.

         So many people mistakenly think that an event is 'God's Will' and God has nothing to do with it. A person uses the gift of God: free will and makes a decision. That decision creates karma and that karma has to be satisfied. Everything happens in perfect order because Karma balances that order. God's will, if someone can call it that is really karma. What we do comes back to us. Every move we make creates a decision tree and how the karma is returned is always a function of which fork in the road we take, which branch of that tree we use.

         And karma never wastes energy so even a tragic event is pregnant with its potential positive consequence. This means that we always need to analyze what we learned from any event.

          Yes, life happens while we were making other plans because the karma that we create can come back to us at profoundly unexpected and usually inconvenient moments. But when each of us incorporates the lesson of a life-changing event and learns from it, then we acquire wisdom. Ultimately, that must be God's hope: that we will all become wise.