"Why didn't you do it in partnership with me?"

After publishing my post last night—prompted in large part by the recent writings of Dr. David Martin—I kept hearing a question pressed upon my heart:

"Why didn’t you do it in partnership with me?"

I paused and asked myself where the question was coming from. As I searched for its source, I recognized the voice of my Creator.

Then another question arose: What if who I know as the Supreme God and the Creator of Humanity—or perhaps just the Creator of me—are not the same?

My earliest memory of partnership reaches far beyond this lifetime. It is a memory of being held in prison. The one who made me kept me there, and to this day I’m still not entirely sure why. Men were assigned to guard me—for my safety, they said—and over time they became dear friends. As the ages passed, some took wives and started families of their own. Others simply continued working beside me. But all of them, eventually, shared one common goal: to set me free.

I don’t believe my Creator saw my condition as imprisonment. The surroundings were lavish. Yet if I were to speak with him directly today, I would gently urge him to understand: for me, it was still a prison of the heart.

What is love without free will? If a woman is created by a man to accompany him, how can she truly choose him unless she is first given the freedom to choose—or not choose—at all, without fear of consequence or punishment?

There is so much more to this story, but I’ll leave it here for now.

Can love ever become truly rich if both parties were not first given equal opportunity to choose or reject the other—regardless of how wonderful the other might be?