At each given point in time, I have free will.
The right way to exercise it is to ask: What is God’s will for me, right
here, right now?
This has to be followed up by diligently seeking God’s will and then sound
testing of the inspiration, the intuitive thought, or the decision, and finally
concerted action.
Anything else is the misuse of the will. Even submission to another human
being is itself an act of the will.
My past passivity and indifference were acts of the will. My victimhood—in
the sense of falsely attributing my beliefs, thoughts, actions, and thus
feelings to the influence or control of others—was an act of the will. My
depression and anxiety, at their root, were acts of the will.
Certainly, as a child, the will is subordinated to the emotions.
Impressions, perceptions, and interpretations feel instinctive and inevitable,
natural in the sense of stemming from one’s nature. As an adult, one is held,
at least by the law, to be responsible for one’s actions. Except in the case of
the criminal insane, the law recognises that people are responsible for their
actions. By extension, the law holds the individual also to be responsible for
their thoughts: planning, plotting, and premeditation are part of the criminal
act, and these are mental acts.
I certainly needed to be taught firstly that I was responsible for
all of my beliefs, thinking, and behaviour and then I needed to be taught how
to be thus responsible, in order to fully exercise that responsibility. But
even as a mid teenager I was aware that I was choosing, for instance
to sit alone and think about Sylvia Plath rather than join in with what others
were doing and make the best of it.
Today, I can see that my self-defeating mental habits, like the grossly
immoral acts of theft or violence, are turnings away from God, away from the
theological virtues of faith in God’s providence and direction, hope for a good
future through the grace of God, and charity in the form of loving God by
serving others.