We are always in a kind of dance with God. God leads; we follow. God wants us to love Him; we are free to choose not to love. God wooes us, C.S. Lewis said, He does not ravish us. We see that today at the end of Mark's description of the feeding of the 4,000. When the crowd had been fed, and was satisfied, and had been with Jesus for three days, He "dismissed" them, and He got into a boat and left. He has satisfied their spiritual and physical needs for the moment, and He then puts them in a position where they have to chose what to do next, what to do with what they have been given. They will go back home, back to their old lives, and it will be up to them to determine whether or not they will be the same people they were, or whether this experience with Jesus will fundamentally change them. Jesus does the same thing with the disciples who He meets on the road to Emmaus. They have an encounter with Him, and ask Him to stay with them. But He refuses. He has given them enough to understand who He is, and to begin to parse out what has happened, but not so much as to force Himself on them. He does that with us too. We encounter Him in the scriptures, in prayer, in the Eucharist. But in all those places He preserves our free will, allows us to decide for ourselves what to do next. It is a choice we make every day-- moving closer to Christ or moving farther away. What choice will we make today?