Freedom Journey

1Christ has set us free to live a free life.

So take your stand!

Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you…

4-6 I suspect you would never intend this, but this is what happens.

When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects,

you are cut off from Christ, you fall out of grace.

Meanwhile we expectantly wait for a satisfying relationship with the Spirit.

For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion

nor disregard of religion amounts to anything.

What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love.

(Galatians 5:1, 4-6 The Message)

The Christian faith is meant to be about living a free, joy-filled, life-giving existence. Christ set us free to live a free life. Yet, some of us still go through life enslaved in some way.

We have our ways of doing things that we have worked on, perfected even, over the years. But there’s a nagging voice of dissatisfaction (I can’t do anything “right”) or a festering frustration (Why can’t people just follow the “rules”?) that often crowd out the voice of life and freedom.

This is a sure signal to us that we are experiencing a kind of soul-slavery. Our “religious” plans and projects, our contrived ways of getting it “right,” become forms of bondage when we presume our efforts will bring about Christ’s life of freedom. Our very spirits end up trapped in cages of our own making.

Sometimes we inadvertently prevent God’s grace and freedom from entering our hearts precisely at the moment that we hunger and thirst most for it.

But Christ promised us freedom – real freedom. In fact, Paul says we have been set free - an accomplished fact with on-going implications.

So why doesn’t it feel like it sometimes? Perhaps our assumptions, our disappointments, our bitter judgments, our unrealistic expectations of ourselves and of others, are barring our escape.

Christ invites us on a letting-go journey. A life-path, if we are willing to walk it, of on-going wholeness discovery. Christ will expose for us a bar of our own self-made jail cell.

Then Christ will show us one small step toward jail-break. It takes a little faith. It takes a little love and kindness, some forgiveness of self and others. These are the letting-go footprints on this freedom journey. May Christ show us one small step to take.