Day 3985 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Galatians 5:1 NIV

Again, just different

And that, again, because we seem to have come upon this continued confusion as to what real freedom really is. And that confusion is born and borne inside this mind tied to this life in which we live as if life is already free seeing as how we have always been free to do as we please. And it’s this understanding of what freedom surely seems to be that seems to you and me more than a fine enough definition of the word seeing as how it accomplishes this swerve that allows us to always head toward what we hold to be our hope.

And seeking for hope is something that none should have any issues with.

Problem is that the things we’ve come to hope in are hopeless. They are legitimately without hope in the world, let alone beyond it. And we, being so consumed by the many hopes of this world, we too become ourselves without hope in the world because it only stands to reason that when you place your hope in that which is only without any to give, you simply won’t find any ever being given. And that’s because there is nothing and nobody who can give what they truly do not have.

And this problem has gotten as bad as it has because we’ve not only arrived at a rather confused, if not at this point entirely corrupted, understanding of freedom, but our very understanding of hope then has been found victim of that outcome. And that’s because, well, turns out that hope and freedom are quite co-reliant upon one another. For where there is freedom there’s too the ability to hope in such liberty arriving always at something better. And where there’s hope there’s hopefully the freedom to chase it down.

But that’s evidence of the issue, isn’t it?

For the way we’ve come to each live our lives seems to show by the day, the hour almost, that we know neither what hope nor then freedom might truly be. Seems as if we don’t have the foggiest of idea as, well, the story we seem to be writing is one written with so many loose ends that it’s almost as if every single day is either a copy of the page written the day before or rather something so entirely different that it seems both from another book and in a foreign language altogether.

Because our approaches change. Our understandings change. Things happen in this life that cause us to pause and peruse why we’ve all these problems we do, or, and vastly more often the case, to use said pause for the cause of coming up with either excuses we could use to blame someone else for the problems we have or rather just delusions that help us defend this stance that we haven’t any problems at all.

All while being so stinking broken and unhappy that it’s blatantly obvious that not only has something gone wrong within our living of our lives in line with our mind’s understanding of hope, freedom, love, life itself but that indeed many things may have gone very wrong in regard to all the above.

Why else would everyone be so unhappy anymore?

I mean honestly, we have so much to be so thankful for and about here in this life and yet we spend every day and most of our nights seemingly drowning inside this fight just to coax our feet to try a little harder to keep barely treading this water that is both want and worry. Indeed, we are anymore so worried about so many things that we, like Martha, have just accepted this idea that we’re here only to play host to whomever may happen to stop by and want to see how great we are at staying always at the ready to amaze them with our skill, intellect and ability.

Missing then that Mary was said, but Christ himself, to have chosen the better focus as it was chosen in faith, a faith that seeks both hope and that because it’s finally free to do so, a focus that wouldn’t be taken from her.

But one rather that would be rewarded with the rare opportunity to literally witness a hope, a joy, a true longing fulfilled in regard to this faith that was talking with them all face-to-face.

How often do we miss those conversations?

How many times have we rather chosen to stay busy working away on what we thought mattered more? How many things have we allowed ourselves to become convinced could matter more than faith, hope, love ever might? Why do we seem to think all these other things might be more important if not because they’re the symptoms of a world conditioned to please people as opposed to follow faith?

Will there ever come that fleeting day in which we look up from our man-focused fears and start wondering why, how, when faith got so hard to care about?

I hope so.

And I hope so because I’m free to do so. And I’m free to do so because I’ve been set free to do so. And I’ve been set free to do so both because Christ came to buy said freedom with His body and His blood, a costly price to be sure and thus a freedom worth more than worrying about all this worldly nonsense that we so often do, and because, well, to have been set free means clearly that there was a freedom that wasn’t had before.

For you cannot give what is already had. And so His having died was done to give us something both worth dying for and too something that we’d not had before.

Which, granted, seems weird on both accounts!

Because, well, it sure seems like we had been free seeing as we were, perhaps still are, all but basking in this understanding of freedom that has in fact always allowed us to do whatever we wanted to, an undertaking that we’re all really good at understanding as, well, all it really asks is that we put ourselves first and thereby seek always for only whatever weather we think might make us happiest.

And too, it just doesn’t make sense that someone would have to die for what we literally are not of the mind to imagine could be any better than this way of life spent literally doing whatever we want without anything more than a mere hiccup or two here or there, problems again resolved as easily as blaming someone else or simply pretending they don’t exist.

But they do exist. And in truth we do know this. And I know that we know this because we have all, as we talk about all the time, we’ve all said or done or thought things that we’ve come around only to feeling bad about. And well, call me crazy but it doesn’t seem that such feelings as guilt or shame are all that great of evidence as to our understanding of anything.

For if we truly understood as much as we’ve always contended we could, well then, again, why is everyone so unhappy? Why’s everybody always so angry? Why is there anymore this all but palpable sense of anxiety and angst running rampant in both our hearts and our homes?

Indeed, if we truly not only understand such gifts as hope and freedom but are in fact living the very best versions of both of them, then why does it seem like the world’s filled with those ready if not eager to just tear one another apart?

Should freedom have found for us this way of life in which all we seem to want to do is just fight? Is arguing amongst ourselves really all we wanted to accomplish in life? Are our opinions, as idolized as they’ve sadly become, are they really that important that we’re willing to set aside the better things we could be doing with our time just to try and defend what we likely can’t make someone else understand?

Does it make any sense whatsoever to spend however much time and effort we do trying to win the world to our side of life?

What will it matter if the whole world agrees with us, likes us, loves us so much that we never feel the sting of hatred or rejection? What will it achieve for us if we get so good at pleasing people that nobody here has a bad word to say about us? Is pleasing people the point of life that it seems to have become for many? On that, if pleasing people is so important thanks to our apparent need for profit and the popularity that brings it, then again, why all the arguing?

Will we ever find any way to truly please everyone?

Have we even truly found a way to please ourselves?

Or rather are we not all still looking always for something else? Something more? Something better?

Something then that we haven’t had before?

Like freedom maybe!

Indeed, I am of the firm belief that one day we’re all going to look up from all of our odd little workings and see that we’ve been fooling ourselves into thinking that what we’d been doing was being done in freedom. Rather, when that veil is torn in our hearts we will start to finally understand what real freedom, real joy, real meaning have always been and how they’ve never been so reliant upon what we thought we had the freedom to do here inside this freedom to choose only to chase whatever we like as opposed to the more that we don’t.

In fact, I don’t even know that any of us could come up with any logical reasons as to why we hate so much as we do. It’s like how I hate onions, and yet I love the flavor of onion powder.

Yeah, we’re pretty messed up in the head!

And yet what’s amazing is that we think that we’re free!

Friends, free from what?

Ah yes, you see, that’s the confusion isn’t it? It’s that most easily overlooked little tweak of a word as is proven in the addition/subtraction of a single letter and a slight adjustment of the other letters’ order.

So often we approach freedom via this thinking about what freedom is for. We think about what all we’re free to do, to seek, to crave. What are we free to want or be or have or hope to hold before long? Our perspective on freedom is always that found up ahead. What are we free to do? Where are we free to go? And, granted, this itself seems to make perfect sense in that, well, forward is where life continues to go. We are all always moving forward as the days come and then go to become what is by this time tomorrow a past that’s just a little bit longer.

A past that we leave behind and never seek to learn from as, again, we have these eyes and hearts and minds that are only interested in focusing on what still lies ahead and just how free we think we are do with it as we’ll please by the time it gets here.

But friends, while there’s a side of freedom that thinks about what that freedom can be used for, maybe it shouldn’t have become so focused on that we’ve all but apparently forgotten the other side that considers what all we need to be freed from.

For, from, one letter and play with the order.

Indeed, we are so transfixed on thinking about all we can use our freedom for that we never stop to think about what all we’ve been given freedom from. And that’s because, unto us, freedom is again about the up ahead where all of our hopes and dreams and plans and things are waiting for us to show up. We are such a forward-thinking people that we’ve each likely an entire past filled with progress that we could still make, all left unmade simply because we won’t learn the lessons that our past mistakes have offered.

All because we’ve always thought that one of freedom’s greatest attributes was rendering mistake and misunderstanding impossible. For after all, if we’re truly free to do whatever we please, then so long as we’ve in fact been pleased then nothing wrong was done. Right? If we’ve been so satisfied and successful that life itself has never felt stretched thin or stressful, then yeah, we must be doing everything right here inside this way of life in which we love to think of freedom as nothing more than our doing whatever we want.

But we can’t actually say that can we?

We can’t actually say that we’ve been nothing but pleased or satisfied in life. We can’t say that everything we’ve ever tried has gone exactly right. We can’t even say that we’ve always gotten whatever we wanted as we’ve all instead had dreams and plans that went either differently than we imagined or unfulfilled altogether. And so, no, we can’t say that nothing has gone wrong.

And that despite our living this life as if freedom meant only our doing whatever we wanted.

Maybe then freedom isn’t about doing whatever we want, you know, seeing as how even that hasn’t managed to work out as perfectly as we probably imagined it might.

So what then is freedom?

I mean, it does seem to have something to do with the things that we do. But, having each of us focused on that side of it for so long as we have, only to have still experienced things that went bad or felt the same, what then is the rest of the story to this freedom thing?

Well, again, it’s that side that considers the things that we’ve been set free from, or need to be set free from. For you see, that is actually the greater part of freedom. Sure, it has something to do with whatever we do, but in fact all freedom begins by being freed from within what was instead a captivity of sorts. Because, again, you cannot be set free from what you were already free from. Jesus wouldn’t have died to free us if we were truly as free as we probably thought we were.

In fact, it’s that we thought we were that caused the cost to be so high.

For our understanding of freedom as being nothing more than our doing whatever we wanted caused us to do some pretty messed up stuff. Stuff that we consequently need to now be set free from.

Which is exactly what Christ did.

He died to set us free.

Free for what?

To be free.

Free from what?

Everything that had kept us in captivity.

(Even, if not especially, our prior understanding of freedom as was what only won the death that is the wage of sin).

Indeed, as we read right here, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. He set us free to be free, to know freedom. Freedom from what? A life that wasn’t as free as we thought it to be. Because, again, you can’t give someone something they already have. And so, His having died to set us free, and in this give us freedom as it’s said here that it was for freedom that He set us free, it’s thus the giving us of something we hadn’t had before.

Thus we weren’t free before.

Even though we had been doing so much of whatever we wanted.

Seems weird, right?

Well, the reason it does is because, well, the reality is that this whole approach to freedom as if it’s nothing more than doing whatever we please, that actually only keeps us slaves of ourselves. It chains us to continually seeking out what might please us. It confines us to living this life that finds us always serving ourselves. And, well, servants aren’t free are they? Rather servants serve at the pleasure of their master. And sure, perhaps we’ve long thought of ourselves as the masters of our own lives.

But even so, this again dissolves right back into our serving ourselves, and more poignant the problem, whatever it is that we’ve allowed to master us.

Because that’s the real problem.

It’s that we’ve each been mastered by so many things that we shouldn’t even have the ability to imagine freedom, let alone pretend we’ve been free all this time. Because we haven’t, have we? No. No rather we’ve been slaves to so many things from society to success to stuff we hang up on our walls. We’ve been slaves to bosses and spouses and these really expensive houses filled with things that break and need then to be fixed. We’ve been held captive by all these thoughts we think about the things we’d like, the things we want to buy, the hopes we hope to have.

We have spent our entire lives living for so much of this world that this world has become our hope.

But friends, even hope is a master over us as it determines both the decisions we make in life, the directions we go to find them fulfilled, the expectations we expect to be waiting for us whenever we arrive at that place in time in which one more of our plans has been fulfilled.

Hope is a master over us.

What then are we hoping in? What are we hoping for?

Sadly the answer to both of those has always been only our once again doing only whatever we wanted. That has been our hope for as long as we know. To just spend this life doing as we pleased, living then as slaves to our own pleasure.

Is that freedom?

Again, sadly, most here seem to think it is. And that’s because most here still live as if doing as they please is the very epitome of life itself.

Is it?

Is it honestly freedom to always have to turn to ourselves seeking the next idea as to what might be better than all the now-failed ideas we’ve had before?

Sounds like slavery to me!

And I say this because I know it is. I know that life spent relying on myself to come up with what might be best, what might feel good, what might go well. And, well, most of it didn’t. Most of my ideas went up in smoke almost as soon as I had them, a reality then leaving me to go back to the drawing board on which I set again to rewriting this story that is my life.

Indeed, I have been a slave to trying to ensure that my life goes right.

But it seems I only know better how to make sure it doesn’t.

And friends, that’s not freedom.

Freedom isn’t something proven inside mistakes, regrets, this shame we sing inside our fear of the past daring to prove that we really don’t know what we’re doing. Freedom is rather this most hopeful of opportunity to walk entirely unbound by human nature, a crumbling society, a world on fire and minds so often the same for what’s usually only the same kind of thing that caused the smoke so many times before.

That’s what Jesus came to set us free from: Living a way of life that just continues to feel empty and shallow and hopeless and hapless and without happiness.

He came to set us free from sin so that we could, in Him, learn to live a kind of life that isn’t again so bound or reliant upon anyone, not even ourselves.

And yeah, it is a decidedly different kind of freedom indeed, and yeah, different can often be pretty scary. But friends, the way I see it is that our attempts at freedom have often found us standing in the rain getting soaked in shame and drown in despair. His version may not stop the rain from coming, but having an umbrella to keep us dry is a pretty nice thing to have.

Especially when that umbrella is hope itself.

Yes, Jesus came to set us free to hope again, free then from what was a life that there was no such hope within.

A difference proven in that our hope is often found only in our finding more of what’s here whereas His hope is the promise of Heaven itself.

Friends, can’t you see the difference in His different kind of freedom?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold