be free
It comes to me, the freedom in not needing to know, like the tickle of a wild wind on my emptied palms, when a friend asks what time our flight, Kevin’s and mine, leaves for Boston.
We walk down a greenway trail, around a bend I’ve never seen, in a place I’ve never been, near where she lives. She has walked this stretch countless times; her feet have memorized the bumps in the pavement. So, I follow along, reading her body language as we walk. A ribbon of her hair, silver blond now with the years, dances around her cheeks.
“I don’t know,” I say, chuckling a little at the giddy realization bubbling beneath that cool admission.
I’m free. Free to trust. Free to surrender control.
June has come with waves of heat and adventure, a month of trips for us that has felt both invigorating and daunting. In April, I began praying for presence and en-joy-ment, asking God to help me not lose track of the fun while doing my mom thing and considering all the practicalities. In response, He has continually invited me to embrace the freedom He purchased for me. He has reminded me that as I trust Him, I am free to love generously and live creatively.
So, in my journal, I’ve been making a list describing my freedom, every aspect I can name, because I need to see the equivalent, at least in words, of all those chains heaped up in a pile at the foot of the cross. Especially when I’m just about convinced that I’m inextricably ensnared.
Right now, I want to spread my arms wide in the open air and let them fall, loose and easy, because as quickly as my friend asks, I suddenly realize that this is a question for which I haven’t even thought to need an answer.
I don’t know. I don’t need to know.
What I do know, more and more, and not just in my mind, is that for countless tyrannies, God has through Christ purchased one glorious, all-encompassing freedom for me, for us. In long, sprawling spiritual conversations, He relentlessly proclaims this fact, even though I’m the child always carrying to Him another longing, another hunger, another snarl of a problem on my flat little hands, challenging Him, and what about this, as if there could ever be anything bigger than His rescue.
Sunlight glints on the water beside my friend and me, the water which ripples with the slow swim of turtles, their heads rising, making dark bumps in golden glass. I watch a squirrel race down the limb of a tree, remembering a snatch of scripture, something Jesus said about how the lilies neither toil nor spin and yet God clothes them more beautifully than King Solomon in all his splendor. So, why worry? He had asked. Why do you have so little faith?
If nature has themes for her preaching, surely God’s faithful, sovereign care is a prolific favorite. I remember that when God finally began to speak to Job, it was with questions that drew their implications from the testimony of the natural world, that asked Job to consider who created and ordered and cared for the vast beauty that sustained mortal life, all the things we human beings can neither manage nor explain, the things beyond our minds, our understanding, our planning and resources.
For freedom Christ set us free, Paul wrote to the Galatians, so don’t submit again to a yoke of slavery. In context, the letter-writer meant freedom from religious legalism, freedom to love and to serve in love, secure in our identity as God’s children. As long ago as the Old Testament prophets, God made it clear that freedom for captives would be part of Kingdom culture, but so often, self-reliance is the captivity I readily accept and allow. Believing it’s up to me, that’s what steals joy, blinding me to grace.
So, what, I wonder, has got you by the throat? You are here, after all, walking the unknown curve with us. The birds twitter, loud and confident and free, and I look over at you and want to ask, is any path unknown if we are traveling The Way?
It’s helpful to me sometimes, in yielding, to ask the Spirit of God to show me the ways I’m still living like a captive, alive, but still wearing the grave clothes, free, but still standing behind bars in a cell He’s already opened. I ask, because often I’ve been living that way for so long, I don’t even recognize the difference between what I’m used to and what God has in mind for me.
My friend laughs out loud, glancing at me with knowing eyes, bright blue, sharp as the sky, no doubt responding to my silly grin, the flippant way I tossed those words, I don’t know.
I grin wider, explaining that Kevin plans our trips, so I just get on the plane with him whenever and wherever he says. She smiles; she knows how generous that feels to me, like dancing in a flower filled field with no other thought than that it feels good to dance. God and I have danced around the truth about my freedom for such a long time, every kind of dance.
She reaches over, lightly touching my arm, points wordlessly toward the ground, at the curling form, the thin, baby-scaled ‘s’ disappearing into the grass beside the trail. We walk around, a wide berth, even though the creature has no mind for us.
In my immaturity, I believed that freedom meant independence–no limits, no trouble, no authority, no need, but these things only represent captivity apart from abiding love. I lack nothing because I am shepherded by God, dependent on Him, because He is my rescue, the fulfillment of my need, the Way I take. To truly be free is to dwell in faith, in union with Him.
Before, we had been laughing, my friend and I, over my introversion. She’d said, “This summer is going to pretty much flatten you, isn’t it?”
It was a statement, not really a question. I’m a homebody who loves a good adventure; she knows this. But as I’ve prayed over our summer pilgrimage, God has reminded me that I’m always at home in Him, that I’m free, free to rest in Him as I go. After all, God instituted Sabbath rest for His people, people on the move, as freedom practice, to retrain the souls of His children, who had been oppressed by an Egyptian pharaoh’s relentless and entirely impossible demands, in, as Eugene Petersen paraphrased from Matthew 11, the unforced rhythms of grace.
My friend and I—you, too–walk along in comfortable silence a bit, watching a butterfly flit over a flush of wildflowers as we pass.
“So, you really have no idea when your plane leaves? Nothing at all about the hotel?”
She chuckles again, looking ahead, her eyes focused on the sky. I can’t read her face. She waits, I feel that, tilts her head as though she’s waiting for me to say something else.
To be honest, sometimes I feel a little silly about this particular aspect of my freedom, the freedom not to know, when someone asks a question like this. I feel, at least for dirty little a pause, that maybe I should know the answer to her question, because, and this a slithering whisper, isn’t freedom really about knowing the things, about deciding them?
God knows that if you eat the fruit, you will be like him.
That depends, of course, on who holds the knowledge and whether they hold it for me or withhold it from me. The enemy, the withholder, always likes to suggest that God is the one withholding. At various times and all over the world, human beings have, as slaves to evil, withheld knowledge and truth to subjugate each other. On the other hand, we are tempted to idolize the intellect, and our addiction to information could bury us. The enemy, who specializes in captivity, can form anything into a length of chain, and he works hard to confuse things, suggesting that captivity is freedom and freedom is captivity. The freed people of Israel repeatedly wondered aloud about whether they were better off while they were enslaved.
But you were called to be free.
“I mean, I think we fly out in the morning.” I fumble, looking up at the whole blank nothing in my head in an effort to make some sort of deduction. “I think he said we’re getting in at around 11? I think?”
My friend smiles and lifts a hand, gently slashing it through the air, as if to erase my sudden absurd need to sound impressively informed.
“Do you know how much I’d like to have that kind of freedom? Not knowing all the details? Trust me, that’s a gift. I love that for you.” In her family, she’s the trip planner.
She glances at me, blue eyes sparkling, smiling my wild smile, and together, we laugh, exhaling joy.
