Lie #16 – Love Is Controlling
from Helena Sorensen Aman:
Lie #16: “Love is controlling.”
Robin McKinley, in her first novel, BEAUTY, writes the loveliest Beast. I see God in that character in a hundred ways. During one of his early encounters with Beauty, he invites her to dinner, and she responds with a shrug. “You’re the master here,” she says, in effect. And Beast replies, “No. It is you who are mistress.” Christians struggle with the issue of control. We want very much to be sure that all of us are thinking, believing, and being exposed to the same things, and that we’re all behaving in the same ways. We’re pretty sure that keeping things/us under control is God’s primary concern. The comforts of authoritarianism soothe our persistent fears. We think that the story of the world is being managed behind the scenes, and that God, like Dr. Strange, knows the one single solitary way that things can be satisfactorily resolved. We cling to that idea like jetsam on the open sea. We believe (well, some of us) that free will is something we’re offered once, when we have the chance to say yes or no to salvation. But we’re very hesitant about free will in general. The idea that all of humanity could be completely free at every minute?! We cannot wrap our minds around the possibility that God could set us loose in the world with endless opportunities to get things wrong, or 6% right, to bumble around with nuclear weapons and pesticides and lobbyists and murder hornets and institutions and fear and insecurity when the stakes are life and death. That would be chaos! Pandemonium! We’re so certain Love is keeping everything under its thumb that we forget that the moment free will is removed from the equation, so is the possibility of authentic relationship. (Insert complex and contradictory Christian explanation of free will, sovereignty, and omnipotence here.) We simply cannot fathom a Love that says, “I’m in this with you. All of it. I don’t know where it’s going (or anyway, not in detail), but I know that I love you. And *I’m* not going anywhere.”
