Freedom Is Coming

"People walk around with so many wounds from their childhood years or from past relationships. People just think that those heavy burdens are a part of life but they're really not. I love to read, see and hear about people really being set free from their past. When Jesus comes in, allows forgiveness to flow to us and from us, changes our thoughts and emotions to something beautiful...just, wow." Quote from my comments in this blog post.

It's almost scary that it's so easy to make a list of these kinds of emotional wounds. Think about it. Do you have a few years from when you were growing up a as kid that you still hate? Maybe your family moved to a new town and you lost all of your old friends. Maybe your parents were entirely too mean, enforcing crazy rules or degrading your talents too often. Maybe you had an alcoholic parent or had to live through a divorce. Whatever the reason, many of us have those times from childhood that we only remember as dark times and we can barely remember any fun memories from those periods.

Or perhaps you have some wounds from later in your teenage or adult years. Maybe you had that one friend that broke your trust severely. Maybe you had a romantic relationship that sucked the life out of you, or maybe you haven't even had a serious romantic relationship yet. Maybe you felt like a loner in too many crowds or you lost contact with that one good friend that you had. Maybe you've gotten slammed by a teacher at school, or gotten fired from a job unjustly, or experienced a church that just didn't care about you.

We've all been there at some point. It's that toxic hole that just sits there in our minds and our hearts. Heck, sometimes we've been the cause of this kind of pain for someone else. I know that I've been on both ends of some of these things. And while the blackness and loneliness during these dark times may not be the same from person to person, we all know how far away light and hope have felt then.

So what do we do with this pain? Where do we place these memories? How do we handle the emotions that come up instantly whenever we talk or think about these things?

For most of us, we end up being the person described in my story, The Freedom Chain. We have that one person, that one event or that one feeling to which we are chained. Some of us can't help but focus on that giant boulder in our lives. We just sit that and become bitter. We'll rage against it and fight it. We'll even attack anyone else that touches that open wound. That boulder remains the centre of our universe.

Some of us try to forget it and move on. We decide in our heads to let bygones be bygones. We chalk it up to a life lesson learned. We write that other person off if we can, or we grin and bear it if we do have to see them again. We're looking outwards now, moving on in our careers and developing new relationships. We're like the person with that chain, walking in circles forever around the boulder. We're mature and we can handle it, right?

It's just that every once in a while, we feel the jerk of the chain on our legs. Every so often, somebody comes along that seems to press all the wrong buttons and those old feelings flare up again. For some reason, we seem to come across people and situations that remind us of that previous pain and all of a sudden, we're like that little kid again and we're just trying to break free.

It doesn't have to be that way. We don't have to stare at that anchor in our lives. We can do better than ignoring it and pretending that we're fine. We don't have to feel that brutal wave of emotion hit us every time we remember. These things do not have to colour our conversations and they do not have to cloud our thinking. Tese things do not have to corrupt every new relationship that we have.

There is a better way. It's not simple and it's not easy. It may not be quick and it might require real action on our parts. I'm not offering some cheap solution, and I refuse to discount how hard those times were for each of us. These are not little things that we faced. We're not going to erase those times in our lives and we can't make those problems disappear. The other people won't magically mature and apologize, and we may not find that our circumstances change at all. I'm just saying that we don't have to be chained up like this. We don't have to be counted among the walking wounded.

Freedom. It's coming. It's available to each of us. It's that distant sound, that faint rumble of thunder. There is a cleansing rain approaching, that water of life that is getting ready to fall.

Freedom is coming.