You might as well take a $100 bill and light it on fire many times over...anyway, as you can probably tell, this might turn in to a rant if I don't redeem it in a hurry...
Freedom, that's what July 4th is supposed to be all about. Freedom to celebrate ones citizenship in the greatest country on the planet...freedom to light off countless incendiary devices...
Freedom to be and to do whatever we feel like, within reason.
That, dear friends, is where the road turns severely in an unsavory direction. The unsavory direction being when we use our freedom as an excuse to exercise the "right" to choose whatever behavior seems prudent to us at any given moment, even if it seems unreasonable or without reason.
I don't want this to turn in to a political statement, because, well, that's not the nature of my business. However, I do want this pithy little tome to include the idea that we were created for freedom that exceeds anything that could be achieved as a result of our civil liberties and even our imaginations.
There was this guy named Paul, who in the first century, shortly after the death of Jesus the Christ, encountered this same Jesus on the road. You could call it an epiphany of sorts.
It was through this very dramatic introduction to Jesus that Paul discovered, freedom is more than an idea, or desire or political agenda...freedom is in a sense, a person, the person of Jesus.
Because, as Paul discovered, it is only through Jesus, that we can find true freedom. Freedom from the lies that have become our lives and freedom to become who we were intended to be.
Paul himself said, in a letter to some friends in a town in Galatia, "It is for freedom that Christ has set you free..."
So in all your revelry and combusting this weekend, I hope you discover that freedom really is more than our ability to express ourselves in any way we see fit. Freedom is about discovering and living in the life we were created to live, through relationship with Jesus Christ.
