The Story of Choosing

God chooses to love us.  There have been times when it seemed that God had no choice but to love us because His nature is love.  To be true to His nature, He must love us.  He has no choice.  However, as time has slipped along, I am not so sure.  To love because there is no choice somehow seems to deny the essence of love.  And, then as we consider the coming of Christ into the world through the stable in Bethlehem, we see a choosing to express love given hands and feet.    

As those who are created in the essence of the Creator, this, too, is a part of who we are.  The choice of loving, or not loving, is at the core of our being.  When we read those early pages of the beginning story, it appears that sin came into the world through the crafty serpent, but, perhaps, there is more to consider than just the story created by the presence of a talking snake in the Garden of Eden.  When Eve and then Adam chose the way offered by the tempting serpent, the choice was not so much about eating or not eating fruit as it was about choosing to love the Lord God and His ways more than anything else.  

Theirs was not a dietary choice so much as it was an act of choosing to love, or not love God in that moment. It was a choice inherent within them as creatures created with the essence of God within them.  The capacity to love, or not love was within them even as it was in the One who brought them into being.  And so, they chose to express love, but by choosing not to love.  The rest of the story we know so well for we continue still to be characters in it.