It's My Life

After a session on Augustine's City of God I wrote this as a response to what we discussed about Free Will. Feel free to read this and let me know what you think. I know these ideas are a bit out there...I don't know how correct this is, but would love to talk through it and see what you guys think.

It’s my life. It’s my choice. These words screamed from all stages and ages of life give a clear indication of how our society views free will. Our lives are our own, they belong to nobody. However, this selfish view of choices and free will is not exactly what God had in mind when He gave us free will. Humanities fixation with its ability to choose wrong should strike us as strange. We seem to be locked into a mentality that associates freewill with the choice of evil and if that choice is ever removed we break out in fits of anger and rage. Yet God, having the ultimate form of free will, cannot ever choose evil. Thus, our fixation with evil must be a perversion of our God-given free will.
Free will on Earth seems to come from two choices – the choice to do good and the choice to do evil. We are born into this world already choosing evil, but then, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we can break from that bond and choose good. The ultimate choice of either good or evil decides where we shall spend eternity. If we choose good on earth we are sent to Paradise and the Second Earth where evil will no longer exist. Yet in this heaven, free will should still exist since we still retain our essential natures. So, in this place our free will becomes like God’s and we are free from having to choose good over evil, but are now in a place where we can choose between two goods. At first, our inner selves seem to cringe at this as a definition of free will. We seem to scream out, it’s not free will unless I can choose not to do good. However, this simply does not make logical sense. Unless our free will is better than God’s through its corruption, the choice of evil is simply a lesser use of our free will.
Our other earthly choice is to choose evil and spend eternity in the ultimate punishment of our free will – isolated from God and forever forbidden from choosing good. There seems to be a struggle here on earth that is a middle ground between these two final states of free will. The outcome of our choices on Earth determines whether our free will becomes eternally blessed or eternally damned. Perhaps, Earth is not where our free will is even at its greatest, but is at a crossroads between one final state or another. Thus the choice between good and evil is the lesser form of free will. When we are bound to constantly choose good over evil we cannot fully experience the blessing of choosing between two goods and never having to worry about our choices leading to sin. What blessed relief there would be in that place, to never again fear the consequences of our choices but to be free to truly choose what we desire, knowing it will forever be right.