The Fall

I think I know why God allows evil in this world, and why God did not stop the first humans from making a bad decision.

This is due to the fact that I had a stroke a couple of weeks ago and was assigned an inpatient rehabilitation center. In the center, I was deemed a fall risk, despite the fact that my stroke was minor, and I was ambulating around pretty well. Still, I had the dreaded red wristband. This meant that I needed to be strapped to a chair and couldn’t even stand up without setting off an alarm.

There is profound indignity in being strapped to a chair against your will and told, “this is for your own protection.” I would reply that it wasn’t for my protection but for their organizational protection that I was strapped to a chair. The protection of the facility took precedence over my agency.

Give me any kind of waiver taking upon myself the risk of a fall, and I would happily sign it. This strap was creating a risk for my soul more than it was preventing a bodily fall. I felt violated, controlled, and like an infant. I needed freedom to heal holistically. But there I was, strapped to a chair or bed for 21 out of 24 hours a day.

There’s something very dreadful about having agency taken from you. Any sort of rehabilitation facility should require one to make their own decisions; to have complete power to choose ones own recovery journey. Being strapped to a chair was actually inhibiting my progress.  Standing up and taking a few steps at will would accelerate my recovery.

You can’t believe how challenging it is to have to go to the bathroom urgently, to push a button, wait 20 minutes, and after practically wetting yourself, have a nursing assistant watch you walk from your chair to the bathroom only to observe you do your business.

Deuteronomy 30 says “See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction.” We are designed to make our own decisions, even bad ones. God’s hope for humanity was for us to choose life, but God wanted us to have the freedom to choose death and destruction. When our agency is interrupted, primal damage occurs to our soul.

It was probably my generation that insisted a fall was too great of an organizational risk to give a minor stroke patient the freedom to stand up on their own. It is the coming generation that better understands the connection between mental health and freedom in making ones own decisions… good or bad.

In Genesis there was no strap constraining the first humans from making bad choices during the original “fall.” Nobody else is meant to make a decision you can make for yourself. Not even God.

Caring for the whole person means giving them the freedom to make good or bad decisions for themselves. The freedom to choose bad is the ultimate good of our design.