October 1, Freedom is Hard

I'm not much of a jumper. Never have been. I could jump respectably when we played volleyball on a gym floor in college, but never off sand. My flippant assessment of that was that the sand monster reached up and grabbed my legs. The truth was, even in college, I was a little overweight and could have been in better shape.

The same is true of freedom. There are things that reach up and grab me as I try to exercise my freedom. The things I've screwed up, my insecurities, that voice within me that takes small things that I have done and turns them huge. And they do their damnedest to make me nothing more than a sum of my shortcomings.

One of the hard things about freedom is being freed from these things while still taking responsibility for your actions. We have all fallen short. We have all screwed up. We all have more than enough things that make us cringe inside when we call them to mind.

Those things are real and they can never be undone. Even when we fix them, they still happened. And in some cases, they caused great harm. And that can sometimes be fixed, but it, too, can never be undone. And sometimes it will come back and bite us over and over again, exploiting that insecurity.

I believe that we have a foe and that foe knows and will exploit our weaknesses. He will heap guilt upon us for things for which we are forgiven. He will do the same for things that need no forgiveness. And he is skilled at disception and manipulation.

For me, the hardest part of freedom is standing firm in the face of that foe. He cannot take away your freedom, but he can convince you that it is not yours to have.