Captives of our own Freedom

Plans formed from omniscient perspective,

But we place ourselves at the centre

of our Universe, we’re not objective,

We’re busy getting treasure

In our eyes

♦

We wear our crowns and build our thrones

On the backs of slaves we would never own,

Knowing the danger of reflecting;

Conscience’s nudges keep rejecting,

Materialism saves

In our eyes

♦

Hunger drives the greed for ‘things’

And in turn greed pursues success

Which fails to quench the emptiness

Having tasted  it

In our eyes

♦

Lusting after something new,

Choosing truths that just aren’t true,

Scared of looking up to

the depth of life our hearts once knew,

It’s too big a sacrifice

In our eyes

♦

The pace increases in our search,

Floundering for the prize unknown,

In our screaming Limbo perched,

We can do it on our own

In our eyes

♦

We envision limitation

In your loving whisper ‘Come’,

Freedom to or freedom from?

We’re captives of our own freedom.

♦

CER

The Joy of Life! :]

I just had the MOST DELICIOUS peanut butter and plum jam sandwich on home-made brown bread. YUM!!!! Seriously, can’t stress how scrumptious it was! I delight in food most days, who am I kidding, I absolutely REVEL in food about 6 times a day…. mmmm food. :] ha ha. :]

Easter Sunday is always a joyous and uplifting shabazz isn’t it? That was a happy day indeed. The singing, rejoicing, hugs and exaltations.

Sun as well, I do like a bit of sun. It’s all so amazing really the way it works. I get all freckly in the sun, gotta wear super high factor suncream though otherwise I burn.

You know what else i really super love? Dappled sunlight through trees, where the green of the leaves is illuminated but not garish and the warmth of the sun’s rays are not so overpowering as to render those who dwell beneath helpless and lethargic (though that’s a nice feeling sometimes too).

Hoverfly through a leaf...

The Irish accent…. another joy bringer, really enjoyed it when I watched The Secret of Kells (I highly recommend watching it if you can)

Animals are such a blessing too, especially when they’re goofy! What is it about goofy people and goofy animals that is so endearing and chortle producing? I think God has a brilliant sense of humour, and I also think there are many of us who need to lighten up and take ourselves a little less seriously. My lively and absolutely ridiculous, but terribly affectionate and cute labrador Tamsin is my role model:

Composure is overrated.

Also under the topic of animals, Cats, they’re SO FUNNY… and cute as anything, if you do like cats, look up Simon’s Cat on Youtube… it’s GENIUS!! :]

And then there’s my Lovely and rather silly family, they bring me such abundance of joy I couldn’t express it in words even if I were Shakespeare (William WaggleDagger Himself) :

   

So many things to be thankful for at the end of every single day, Friends, Fun, Beauty, Truth, Food, Music the list is endless.

“The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD turn his face toward you and give you peace.”

Escape

We could all do with a bit more of these in our lives, but I’d like to query whether freedom to experience these can be found in a freedom from the hardships of life. You see all the time I am becoming more convinced that freedom is not really found in escaping from something, but freedom is at it’s most liberating when found IN THE MIDST of something.

I’ve not been bullied for a long time, but I want to use bullying as a example to illustrate what I mean. I (as I’m sure is the case for almost everyone) was on the receiving end of a pretty sizable amount of bullying when I was little (littler than I am now, for those of you who still think of me as little ;] ). So I was taken out of  ‘Ysgol Feithryn’ (Welsh for Nursery School) for a while to avoid one bully, primary school brought with it a whole host of bullies (not without the mercy of some happy friendships too) and the first part of secondary school was the climax of emotional torture (seriously what happens to girls at that age to make them so ruthless?), but you know no TACTICS, punishment, or retaliation, no amount of escaping the bullies had any huge effect on my liberation from hurt. I found a much more penetrative kind of freedom than that though. Man, it took a while, and hey, it’s not like people’s words or actions can never wound me anymore, but the core joy that I have is not easily shattered. The change had to be in me. My perception of myself, the bullies, the situation is what had to change, and though difficult, it was such a BLISSFUL transformation. (I do think though that Bullying is absolutely wrong, and should be punished etc, and there are helpful things that can be done, but for the sake of a more permanent and deep liberation then other stuff has to happen too)

Sometimes I wish I could go back and talk to my tiny self and explain that what other people say about me doesn’t change the truth about who I am. That something being the ‘norm’ doesn’t mean it’s the best, in fact, so often the norm is far from ideal, that being certain of the truth and living it regardless of what goes on around you is so fulfilling, that *living with love and integrity may seem costly when it’s counter cultural or you are misunderstood or taken for granted, but in time it brings such rich rewards, oh and so much more stuff that I can’t even put into words. But I guess that I was told a lot of that, and that you just have to live through some journeys to learn some truths.

*I threw of the shackles of living to please others. (And ironically it was around then that all the bullying stopped, although maybe it stopped as a result of that, or maybe it didn’t stop but I just didn’t notice?) But I want to throw in some clarification clauses here; Firstly, ‘not living to please others’ doesn’t mean not being loving or kind to others (which may please them sometimes) but it means that you love and show kindness regardless of the reception or acknowledgement that you may or may not get, *that the joy is in the giving, not in the recognition, and that way, wonderfully, your heart does not get tossed about on the storm of fickleness of human behaviour, because none of your identity rests on whether a person accepts you or not (and every time you develop friendships etc. as a result it’s an added glorious bonus). Secondly, just because you are not living to please others, that you will not find deep liberation in living purely to please yourself either. Now this is the bit that sound pretty extreme, but it’s true, and it’s wonderful, awesome, lovely and challenging: I live to love God. The whole purpose of my life is to Love my heavenly *Daddy. That is the umbrella over the massive complex of my actions and beliefs, next comes *loving other people, thats one (important) way of expressing my love to God you see, because He MASSIVELY LOVES each and every person, so every time I show love so someone, that’s part of His plan, He loves it. Loving people can happen in heaps of different ways, but I won’t go into detail about that now (though a few of my previous blogs have summed up what I understand Love to look like day to day).

It’s absolutely the best thing in the world, as well as the hardest thing. Every day I delight in God and He delights in me. Every day I aim to Love as best I can. Every day I mess up. *Every day I come back to the forgiveness that Jesus bought me on the cross, and know that despite my failings, God and I are best friends.

So at the end of the day guys, it’s the *truth that sets you free. Now the truth is always true whether you know it or not, so I guess the important past is knowing it. Do you know what the truth is? If you know it in your head and in your heart, I’m telling you, nothing will shake your freedom, you won’t need to escape anymore, you’ll be liberated IN your situation.

                 

*Colossians 3:23-25  

²³ Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, ²⁴ since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.

*Hebrews 6:10-11 

¹⁰ God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them.

    ¹¹ We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure.

*Acts 20:35 

³⁵ In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’ ”

^{* I John 3}

¹ See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! 

*Ephesians 2 

His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, ¹⁶ and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. ¹⁷ He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. ¹⁸ For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.

 ¹⁹ Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household

*1 John 4

¹⁰ This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹ Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

*John 8:31-32

 ³¹ To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. ³² Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

1 Peter 1:22

²² Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart.

xx

As long as there’s HOPE

So I’ve got this necklace that I made last summer. I wear it every day.  It is made out of a strip of black leather (not very vegetarian of me I know, but that’s a whole other matter) and eight little wooden cube beads. It looks a little bit like this:

—–J–U–S–T–I–C–E–?—–

But it’s a bit tatty now. The thing that strikes most people when they see it is that it has a question mark at the end of it. Actually most people think that it’s funny, which it is. But there’s a serious side to it.  Some people are offended by it. Seems odd right? I’ll tell you why though, because acknowledging justice means acknowledging right and wrong, and for a lot of us, that means admitting that we’re wrong, selfish. I made the necklace because of God… God really cares about people, and when some people are treated horribly by other people He gets flipping cross. I had a realisation. I am one of those oppressors. I frequently act in a way that implies that I am superior to other people, and their desperate needs are inferior to my wanton desires.

But it doesn’t have to be like that.

THAT is why there is a question mark. The necklace challenges me daily, and others, should they choose to accept, to live in a way that comes in line with the ideals that many of us profess. Bear with me, that sounds very vague and unattainable, but wait. We have a legal system in our country (as do most countries) that is in place to ensure that justice is done. Those who commit a crime are made to pay for it in some way, also in court ideally no individual has higher or lower rank than another. We generally have a sense of FAIRNESS that says that people should have EQUAL rights. In sports teams or individuals have to abide by the same rules as other teams or individuals to make the game FAIR. Most educated people would agree that all human beings are intrinsically of equal value. Somewhere in our core there’s something that tells us that human life is sacred.

The problem is the disconnect. If we truly believe that people are valuable and should be treated ‘fairly’ then we will not be willing to accept that vast numbers of individual feeling human beings are treated horrifically every day. If we truly believe that each person is as valuable as another then we would not think it was okay for us to buy luxury items made by the hands of cruelly treated slaves who do not have the essential requirements for healthy life.

So it might be that we are daunted by the huge abyss of human suffering that we perceive, I totally empathise with that. But the good news is we are not responsible for the whole world’s actions, we’re only responsible for our own. That means we are responsible for what we do, and we’re also responsible for what we choose not to do… and for me, that is the scary part.

But there’s more good news: We ABSOLUTELY CAN make a POSITIVE difference in our HURTING world. 

Now I’m getting to the crux of my ramble… If every time we make a choice we bear in mind the consequence of our choice for EVERYONE, and we choose to do what is compassionate we WILL be living justly, we will SEE JUSTICE OCCUR!! 

So even though I know that many people are hurting I also know that when I choose to buy Fairtrade food, when I get clothes from charity shops and when I have lunch with someone who’s lonely, I change someone’s life for the better. (And if you know me then by now you’ll realise that you don’t have to be extraordinary to make such a difference)

I genuinely believe that as long as there are Humans there will be a sense of Justice,

And as long as there’s a sense of Justice there will be people HOPING FOR that Justice to come about,

And as long as there is HOPE then good things will happen.

So I have a question for you…. (and me)

JUSTICE?

xx