We choose life or death, blessing or curse, sickness or health, poverty or prosperity.
Well, at some point or level, maybe. There are an awful lot of people in the world who definitely did not choose to be born in sickness (or handicapped) or in the poverty (and not infrequently slavery) they find themselves in... And if we go back to "Adam and Eve" they made a choice through which "death came to all."
This "choice" or "free will," is one of those conundrums we find in scripture. On the one hand we have Romans 3:11: "There is none that understandeth,
there is none that seeketh after God." and we have John 6:37: "All that the Father gives me will come to me; and
him who comes to me I will not cast out." We are born physically (of water -John 3) but dead spiritually. Spiritually dead people cannot choose spiritual life - they're dead. Or to put it another way, according to Paul's picture, we were/are "slaves to sin." Slaves don't have choices about their slavery - that is the nature of slavery.
Yet God, being committed to the welfare of ALL people, IMHO, is doing his utmost to plant 'seeds of life' in all of them, planting the ability to do good (and Satan CANNOT do good - yet we see good even among un/nonbelievers); He plants in many people a longing for more; gives some a sense of a "God-sized hole" in their life, and so on. He has endless ways to entice us to make the right choice. John 6:44 says "
No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day." The Father must make us willing to come, willing to choose. On our own we would never choose him. He may not make the final choice for us, but He definitely tries to "create the suitable pre-conditions" that will attract us to Him.
There's a beautiful illustration of this kind of 'operation' in Exodus 23 and Deuteronomy 7, where God says to the Israelites, in effect, "I will not directly remove the Hivites, Canaanites, and Hittites, from the land by force, but I will send hornets before you to make them willing to leave."
In the final analysis, God is ALWAYS the one who takes the positive, constructive, life-giving initiative.