The newspaper informed me that a child died senselessly in an auto accident, and my thoughts went back nearly 20 years—to 1991—when the child who died was my child. Coming back from a ski trip, Jill drove head-on into a semi-trailer truck on a rural highway.

The young man with her was badly bruised, but his life never was in danger. Jill was killed instantly.

The automatic reaction of loved ones is to question where God was. Why didn't he intervene and stop the accident? Why did he allow something like this to happen? After all: "God is great; God is good; we thank him for our food;" and we expect him to intervene when bad things may happen to good people.

In the mess of emotion that engulfs one at such a time, it's unrealistic to expect us to think rationally, but the time needs to come when we do more logical thinking. For example, if God intervenes in situations like this, he turns people into puppets, controlling what they do. We start to do something and God says, "Nope! Not that! I won't let you! You're going to do this other thing instead."

God and we chose long ago not to play the roles of puppets and puppet master. Back in the first Garden, God said to the first people, "You've got my permission to do a whole lot of things, but don't eat the fruit of that one tree in the middle of the Garden."

"Sorry," those first people said, "but we have freedom, and we don't need your permission. We will eat what we choose to eat. In fact, we have freedom to choose to disobey you." And they ate.

God could have said, "Oh, that's okay; I forgive you. I won't hold you responsible for what you did." Anyone who's been a parent knows what happens when you announce consequences to your kids and then don't stick to what you said.

This is the first of an infinite number of dramas that have happened right up to today—maybe even to this minute in your life. We want freedom, but we don't want to have to suffer the consequences of our choices. And since we're part of a whole specie of intertwined people, our choices impact the lives of others, even innocent others. That's what it means to have freedom.

So, the question for my wife and me, and for millions of others faced with similar situations, is this: Do I want freedom to make my own choices and my own mistakes, or do I want to be nothing but a puppet, totally controlled from the outside? I think we would all choose freedom.

But with freedom comes responsibility and consequences. That's part of the deal.

Sometimes those consequences aren't very nice.