January 24, 2026
When my frontal-lobe started to mature, I chose to begin focusing on my education again. We were on our final leg in the Navy with plans to leave active duty at the end of my tour. Married with a little baby, I needed more certainty about my future. Both Cities Colleges of Chicago and Troy State University offered classes on the base. Troy State offered a more comprehensive catalog; but Cities Colleges was poised to help newbies like me. With my time in the Navy dwindling down, I signed up for one course with City Colleges of Chicago to see how it would go.
I was super excited to re-engage my brain. Together with a friend, we rode the ferry to the Windward side of the base, boarded a bus, and stood in line to sign up for class. Being a newbie and with class sizes limited, my choices were few; but one class was more intriguing than the others: Ethics 101. And with that class, there began my path toward a new life.
From Week 1, I knew this class was going to be engaging and fun. Our professor had been a former Navy Chaplain (a Lutheran at that), and he just had the professorial look about him. Who better to teach a class on ethics and morality than a man of the cloth, I thought.
Over eight weeks, we touched briefly on topics such the sophists and ethical relativism; the notions of virtue, righteousness and hedonism; and familiarized ourselves with thinkers such as Immanuel Kant (and even Kral Marx). The readings were the furthest thing from light, and the discussions engaging. Of all the assignments, I only remember one: a challenge to affirm or deny the concept of freewill.
For hours and hours I grappled with the concept of freewill. My faith being dormant at the time, I was forced to think up God again for the first time in a long time. If there were a God, I mused, and He desired our devotion, why not just create beings who were automated to obey and do as instructed? Why not just create us with divine determinism?
While I hadn’t cracked a bible since Confirmation (and didn’t know where to begin), my finite mind grappled with notions of an omnipotent God. Yet, I believed I had freewill, for if I didn’t, I surmised, then I was nothing more than a robotic being with set course in life where I had not control of its meaning.
Little did I know that one course began a journey of rediscovering God and the life he’d set before me. A decade later, out of the Navy, my bachelor’s degree earned, and now in in seminary, my brother mentioned he felt he’d been called to ministry but didn’t go down that road. I mused: Did God know that my brother would pass, but then passed the baton onto me? (I’ll never know). Yet, even then, God gave me the choice: choose ministry or a vocation in industry? You know the choice I made.
Even after all these years, I wonder: Did God make the choice for me or did I make it on my own. And to that, I will simply answer: Yes, yes to both. Freewill is a gift the Lord gives us all—the freedom to choose Him or another path. But that freewill doesn’t simply end with that choice.
I gonna be frank with you, I’ve been on the struggle bus this last week — today especially. This morning, news began to spread of another shooting in Minneapolis. (I’m sure you’ve heard by now.) Federal agents shot and killed a man who’d poked his nose where it didn’t belong.
Federal officials claim he had a gun and 2 clips of ammunition. Local leaders are painting the man as just a concerned citizen, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Who are we to believe? Fingers are pointing in multiple directions; politicians are obfuscating the facts; propaganda is being spread; and protesters and agitators are rallying to take down the feds? And… amid it all, I’ve been praying and asking God, “Where are you in all this? Why don’t you just bring it all to an end?” The answer, I believe is freewill.
Every day, every person on this earth has the freedom to make good choices and bad ones too. We can choose the path of freedom, love, peace and kindness, or a path of destruction. Our words and deeds can put us on a path of healing and justice, or further us down the path of chaos and catastrophe. God, hearing our prayers, and yes directing our paths, still says, “Choose.” Until Christ comes again, our knees can bow to whatever whim we choose; and even when Christ returns (and every knee is forced to bow to Him), even then, many will choose not to align with Him.
While my mind is still swirling amid the confusion, I’m choosing today to thank our God for the freewill he gives. Today, I choose God. I choose peace and prayer, and the opportunities he gives to make my voice heard, not on the streets with disrespect, but through the ether with words of reverence.
Heavenly Father, in the freedom you give, help us all to choose wisely our next steps. Speak words of wisdom to all our elected politicians, helping them understand the choices before them today. For with their words and actions, they have the freedom to restore or the freewill to impair. May, in the freewill you give, we all choose wisely.