What is freedom? Being untethered. Making your own choices. Not needing. Not requiring. Not feeling dependent on anyone for your needs or your happiness. We hear the self-help set telling us not to allow our happiness to come from anyone. This is freedom.
And of course, in this freedom, we can finally find happiness.
Naturally, if we are not finding our happiness from others, then we are finding it from ourselves. “Freedom from within”.. right?
But. What if you’re empty? What if you’re lonely? Or… What if you’re a-okay?
There’s still a problem…
The problem is that you and I, by default, are broken, even when we tell ourselves we’re a-okay. From the mother’s breast to the search for companionship, we were born needy. We need the gasoline of connection to sustain us. We need the glue of the love and friendship of others to make our broken pieces stick back together.
I make mistakes. Little ones on a good day, but always mistakes… they litter my supposed path of isolated freedom. They reduce my wide-open fields to a trash littered landscape. And suddenly I realize that freedom, as I knew it, is not the answer I hoped it to be.
So is the answer to our loneliness once again, other people? Not exactly. Because other people are broken, too. We can’t cure ourselves with tainted medicine We need something pure. Something perfect to look to – to be guided by, to love and be loved by. The only thing I can think of that fits this description is God. The author of this complex and perfectly orchestrated existence, of the past, of the future, of the cosmos… A deep trust and faith in God, a constant meditation, a constant dialogue… this is the balm. This is, ironically freedom because it’s the only thing that saves us from the confusion and abysmally depressing obsession with ourselves.
So does that mean that we don’t need others after all? Not so fast… We are broken, yes, because we have free wills and because we like to experiment, sometimes to our detriment, with the freedom that comes with having a free will. But we were also made in God’s image. We have His beauty, His artistry, His love… inside us all. He made us that way. And I need Him from you, and you need Him from me. We need God the most because he is the only perfect answer. And we need each other. The more we connect with each other, the stronger our bonds to each other and to God can become, the more of God we extrapolate as a whole from this sense of community. This is powerful antidote to our loneliness and this, ironically, is freedom… because the presence of God in our minds and our hearts and our lives… because, as we covered, freedom = happiness. You have never experienced genuine joy, laughter and happiness until you have experienced a community where God is so evident. It’s like he gave us all a dime and when we put all our dimes together, we suddenly realize that we are rich beyond compare. It is the kind of happiness that makes your heart so mixed up and overwhelmed that tears come.
This. This is freedom. Freedom from having to try to do it all by ourselves. Freedom from trying to pretend. Freedom from trying to know and have the answers.
You can roam this earth alone, untethered by faith or people. But that freedom will quickly become chains….watching your back, looking for snakes in the grass, longing for love, sustaining your isolation with lies…
Freedom, as we know it, is an illusion, a farce. True freedom is walking hand in hand.