The choice is yours!

I'm going to get a little philosophical this week.  I was at Target with Savannah this past Tuesday.  She had received a gift card from my brother, Jamie, Angie, Madeleine, and Caroline for her birthday.  (Savannah thanks you guys for the gift card).  As we went through the store, we first stopped off at the Wii game section.  Savannah had her heart set on a Littlest Pet Shop Wii game.  When we got over there, we discovered that there were no copies of the game in stock.  We could have gone to a different Target another day, but Savannah wasn't leaving that store until she had spent her gift card.  I then proceeded to show her some of the other kid friendly Wii games that they did have is stock.  Mistake!  Now she couldn't decide between three or four different games.  I called Nikki for help.  Nikki mentioned that she thought Savannah wanted an actual Littlest Pet Shop toy.  My next mistake, was telling Savannah what her mom thought.  We then headed over to the toy section, so that she could look at Target's selection of Littlest Pet Shop toys.  When it was all said and done, we looked at Polly  Pockets, Littlest Pet Shops, Barbies, and a plethora of other 7 year old girl friendly toys.  Oh, and did I mention that Porter was with us.  After about 20 minutes of surveying the toys, Porter was complaining and my patience had about reached their limits.  Finally, Savannah decided to go with a Wii game.  This little experience in patience taught me a lesson.  Everyday we are faced with more choices than we can probably count.  Some of them are small, insignificant choices, such as, what should I wear today, what should I eat for lunch, which type of toothpaste should I buy at the store.  Others are a little more important, from what time should I get up to give myself time to read, ponder and pray, to how to respond to someone at work who offends me, to deciding whether or not to tell the truth about something.  Heavenly Father watches me make these decisions, and what patience He must have in watching me.  The patience I had to exude while Savannah chose how to spend her gift card is but minuscule compared to that of God's patience as He witnesses us make dumb choices in life.  Choices that can affect, not only our eternal progression, but the eternal progression of others as well.  How many lives are affected when I make a bad choice.  But then again, being able to make choices in general is a blessing that God has given us.  A few weeks ago, I mentioned the attributes of God.  I described Him as an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent Father.  But how could God be all of this, and there still exist evil in the world?  The first thing that I realized is that though God created our spirits and bodies, that we are all independent beings from Him.  In other words we have personalities and traits that He does not control.  While our spirits dwelt with Him in the pre-mortal existence, He gave us the blessing of choice, to be able to make decisions on our own even when we were but spirits without physical bodies.  In the Garden of Eden, God did not force Adam and Eve to obey Him.  He desired that they obey Him by choice.  Therefore, He gave them the choice to partake of the fruit of the tree of good and evil.  It was the partaking of that fruit that would give them the knowledge of distinction between good and evil.  They would then be able to experience the bitter from the sweet, the feeling of joy and of pain, and they would do it by their own choice.  Since the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, both good and bad have entered the world.  Though God could control all that happens here on earth, He does not, for He desires that His children decide for themselves how to react to this harsh yet beautiful experience of life.  Some have been born into horrific situations.  Unfortunately, those situations were determined mostly by the decisions of those that came before them, and because we live in an imperfect world where God allows evil to exist with the good.  Is it possible that God, then wants us to experience the bad so that we may better appreciate the good.  An example to think of, would be to picture your own children.  As parents we try to teach them to do good things.  Do we not do that so that at some point they will decide for themselves to choose the good?  I know I receive more satisfaction from watching my children make good choices rather than watching them do something because they felt coerced or forced to do something without choice.  Just like a loving parent, God wants the same for us.  A wise philosopher named Truman G. Madsen once said that perhaps God isn't omnipotent as we think He might be.  For example, He will not and probably cannot do things that are contradictory, like creating a rock that He cannot lift.  It doesn't make sense.  But besides that, there are eternal laws that He will not break.  Otherwise, why would He send His only begotten, perfectly sinless Son to die for some horribly disobedient people like us?  Couldn't He have just saved us without having to have done this?  It goes to show that there is an order to everything and that it all falls back to the fact that He will not take away the freedom of His spirit children to choose.