The space where we find freedom

Viktor Frankl, psychologist and Auschwitz survivor, writes in Man’s Search for Meaning, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space.  In that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

From my own journey with God, I would write that God did not create us as puppets to force us to love Him and glorify Him. He does not compel us to love and forgive each other with patience and kindness and mercy.  Instead, between the actions of others and our response to them, we have the choice, the freedom to love or to reject, to accept or to deny. Or as Richard Rohr would say, in any situation we have the power “to transform the pain or to transmit it.”

Steens_Mt, Kiger_Gorge