Lenten Journey: Broadening Your Free Will

Have you heard the quip, “If his brains were TNT, he couldn’t blow his nose!”

Well, in truth, the mind is a powerful place. While you are reading this, you are capable of so many more thought processes than just the reading of a single sentence. In fact, when I do couples counseling, I like to point out that, while I am speaking, they are likely to be thinking about many other things even as they try to listen to me attentively. They might be thinking about the stove that was on right before they left for this appointment. Or if they can get to the grocery store before picking up the kids from school. Or what are they going to have for dinner tonight. Or they might be anticipating what I’m going to say next, particularly if they are worried I’m going to slay a sacred cow. “You need to give up Monday Night Football” or “Maybe dinner at your mother’s doesn’t have to happen every Sunday night.”  A whole slew of thoughts can come and go just in the amount of time it takes me to speak this paragraph. So, when they are having a conversation with each other, the same thing can happen and then – Surprise! They don’t hear each other. Someone hears what they thought someone else was going to say. Or misses a really important plea because they got distracted.

The mind is powerful to its own detriment. It can do many things at once but that doesn’t mean it can do them all really well.

But one thing the mind can do exceptionally well is rationalize. Justify. Selectively choose all the reasons why the path we WANT to take is the path we SHOULD take. Try this experiment. You are going to paint a wall in your room and you need to choose a color. Make a list of all of the colors in the rainbow for options. Now, imagine that you don’t have the letter “e” so you can’t consider any colors with the letter “e” in them. This is the power of rationalization: to take all those choices and then limit itself to a few choices that aren’t, in actuality, your best. Or maybe you only have one left or none.

Now imagine your Higher Power and a community of friends. They each have a gift to give you. One by one, they present you with another letter “e” and, one by one, you regain the choice of another color that you had previously lost.

In the 12 Step movement, there is a step that says “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him” and people think that we are about to lose something when we give up our will. But think of the will, as it exists in an isolated rationalizing mind, as the self-defeating ways that we actually limit ourselves through the power (and limitations) of a rationalized self-will and we see that turning over our will actually means that we receive. We increase what had once been limited.

The rationalized self-will provides us with a limited set of choices and a high number of unhealthy ones. The will turned over offers us choices where the unhealthy ones are overcome by a plethora of healthier choices that we can now see for their value. Then, can we truly choose.

How can you reach out to a friend, to your Higher Power, to a community and seek support in choosing and transforming your self in your life? What choices will be available to you once you have freed yourself from your solitary rationalizing will and find a greater will, one that is still yours but with a broader perspective?

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You are welcome to take this journey in solitude in your own personal journal or share your reflections. If anything that you do makes you think you might want to continue a journey using Spiritual Direction, now or in the future, you can make an appointment with me through my website: 

www.RedRocksSDC.com 

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