Choice, the sacred gift offered by God’s love, not to bind the will, but to awaken the heart. (1 John 4:19)  Not to control, but to create the possibility of love.  For without choice, there can be no love.  And without love, life loses meaning.

But choice, in the hands of the broken, can bend.  Can twist.  Can wound.  And from those wounds, evil find its door.(James 1:14)  Evil knows this.  It doesn’t rush in with fire,  it waits in the shadows of choice, where pain and fear bend truth, where wounds whisper louder than wisdom.  Choice, the sacred gift, offered by God, but twisted by sin.  (Jeremiah 17:9)

Evil walks among us.  And if we are not diligent, it walks within us.  Not always in rage, but often in reason.  Not always in violence, but sometimes in vision bent just slightly away from truth.  And choices made, time and time again, can carry us further from the light, until it becomes no more than a faint glow on the horizon. (Mathew 6:22)

But even evil reveals what it hides from, the Light.  We know the darkness because we’ve seen the dawn.  We feel the wrong because we were made for the right.  And that knowing, that desire for what’s good and just and true, it didn’t come from us.  It was written into us.  By the One who is Good.  Who is Just.  Who is True. ( Ecclesiastes 3:11 )

Still the Light does not withdraw.  Still redemption is not revoked. (John 1:5) For even suffering, when surrendered, becomes the soil of salvation.  Even the deepest wrong can be the place where grace takes root. (Romans 5:20)

So the cycle is not a prison, it’s a door.  One that opens not by force, but by surrender.  Our wounds can harden us, or humble us.  Evil bends the will, but grace restores the soul.  And when we turn, even from the darkest place, we do not find condemnation.  We find a Father running toward us. (Luke 15:20)