WHAT IS FREEDOM REALLY?

I AM CERTAINLY FINDING IT TO BE VERY COUNTER-CULTURAL

and often seems to be a road we have to switch to even if no one else understands.

These people make a big show of saying the right thing, but their hearts aren’t in it . . . so I am going to step in and shock them awake, astonish them, and stand them on their ears.—Isaiah 29:14, Eugene Peterson translation

I'm not quite sure how that quote from The Message applies but it came to mind after I entered the title of this post. So there it is.

I submitted a thread a few weeks ago over on The Shack Forum asking a question about one of the main themes of the book.....Freedom. What is freedom?

Papa pretty early on asks Mack if he thinks he is free to leave the shack which then leads to this:

"Or, if you want to go just a wee bit deeper, we could talk about the nature of freedom itself. Does freedom mean that you are allowed to do whatever you want to do? Or we could talk about all the limiting influences in your life that actively work against your freedom. Your family genetic heritage, your specific DNA, your metabolic uniqueness, the quantum stuff that is going on at a subatomic level where I am the always-present observer. Or the intrusion of your soul's sickness that inhibits and blinds you, or the social influences around you, or the habits that have created synaptic bonds and pathways in your brain. And then there's advertising, propaganda, and paradigms. Inside that confluence of multifaceted inhibitors," she sighed, "what is freedom really?"

Without a doubt this has to be at the very top of the list when it comes to things that have occupied my mind over the past 30 months. It also happens to be one of those things I have found most people not wanting to talk about or not wanting to personally face. When it was for freedom that Christ set us free, it just seems stunning to me that even amongst Christians it is something that is rare to find.

Since I made the post about freedom on The Shack forum back on October 1 it has been viewed about 150 times but no one has touched it. Is there anyone that drops in here that wants to take something from that excerpt from The Shack and share how freedom is becoming real in your life and maybe what had been standing in the way of freedom?

I myself will begin with something that more than likely would fall under soul sickness that inhibits and blinds, and had this not been exposed in me to where I could no longer deny it, I really don't know if anything would have changed in me. I had to be in control which actually turned out to be a big fat illusion/lie. I wasn't in control of anything and never had been.....I was just an obnoxious know-it-all who had a much better plan than everyone else because I had it more together than anyone else. That turned out to be a big fat illusion/lie also. Now that sounds funny in light of yesterday's post and what began to happen in my life once I owned up to that soul sickness/inhibitor/blinder. To explain how wonderful this freedom feels is really impossible. But that is what I would point to as the beginning of freedom in Christ in my life and surprisingly it happened 17 years after what I had assumed was a serious dedicating of my life to Jesus.

Freedom turned out to be something totally different than the verbal dedicating of my life to Jesus and the religious training that immediately began once I made that dedication and the religious mind that it formed in me. All of those things were a strengthening of the soul sickness.