Our family watches the TV show Hoarders sometimes. One reoccurring theme I’ve noticed is that many times the adults who have lived with the disease of hoarding have grown children who love them so much and want to help their parents live in a safe, healthy environment. They will beg and plead for their parents to get the help they need.
Yesterday’s episode showed an adult daughter offering to pay the monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment so her parents could move out of their almost-condemned house into a place where she could rest at night knowing her parents’ health and safety wasn’t in jeopardy. However, her parents continued to refuse the free gift of life, choosing to remain in a house that would eventually kill them. The daughter was in tears, knowing she couldn’t force them to move, but hating to watch them destroy their lives.
It got me thinking. I wonder if it’s similar to how God must feel about us. We’re His children (not His parents) but He wants nothing more than for us to accept the free gift of salvation that He offered up His Only Son, Jesus Christ on the cross to give us. Yet so many of us flatly refuse His help – preferring to do things our way even though they are leading us on a path of death and eternal separation from Him and His love.
Maybe you’re already a Christian and so the above example doesn’t apply to you. Maybe instead God is offering you the gift of freedom from an addiction, a lifestyle of anger, fear, anxiety, or illness. Are you surrendering to His way, His free gift for you? Or, are you telling God, “No, thanks. I’d rather live in this condemned house that isn’t safe and will eventually kill me.”
God is too much of a gentleman. He won’t force His choices on us. He wants us to come to Him freely. The adult daughter legally could not force her choices on her parents. It was killing the daughter emotionally to walk away and leave her parents in their unsafe environment when she was offering them a safer alternative that they weren’t willing to accept.
What is God inviting you to lay down today in order to give you the blessing of something better? I’d love to continue this conversation in the comments below.