FREEDOM FIGHTERS

God tells us we can hardly think we’re living in obedience to him if we’re not proclaiming freedom to others.
Then, in the New Testament, Jesus comes along, and in his first recorded sermon he declares why his Father had him come to earth: “He has sent me to proclaim freedom.” And all those who follow in the way of Jesus walk this same path. We are to proclaim freedom. Because this is what guerrilla lovers do. We are freedom fighters.

When I think of freedom fighters, I think of my wife, Jennifer. Jennifer knows what it feels like to live in bondage. As a young teenager she started suffering with major depression. It was nearly uninterrupted, unexplainable, massive depression. I met her when she was twenty. Things had gotten so bad that whenever possible she would not get out of bed, trying to sleep her life away rather than experience it.

Now, sixteen years later, not only is Jen free from depression, she has played a significant role in freeing many other women from it as well. So how did she go from being confined behind a seemingly impenetrable wall of despair to helping other women peek through and then break through the walls that held them in?

First, she focused intensely on herself. Now, most everyone I know is focused on themselves, and I think that may be our biggest problem, and it’s the reason I’m writing this book. But Jen focused on herself in a very different way.
Most people are agents for their own happiness. They do what leads to their feeling good. Jen took a very different approach. She became dedicated not to her happiness but to her wholeness. Instead of doing what made her feel good, she began doing what would lead to her being healthy. In fact, most of the actions she took made her feel bad. She sat through hours of painful counseling. She read books that made her feel uncomfortable. She asked people to keep her accountable.

She had spent twenty years digging down into a pit of depression, so getting out of it was not going to happen overnight. It took years. But Jen, though discouraged at times, never gave up. She continued to focus intensely on herself, on her wholeness, on her holiness. She did whatever it took. When she fell down, she got back up and kept walking. What about you? Are you focusing intensely on yourself? Not on your happiness but on your wholeness. Not on what makes you feel good but on what makes you healthy. Most of us live with this delusion that if I do what I want to do now, I will still become a person worth becoming. You won’t.

What we want to do in this moment is rarely what’s best for us. We need to take a longer view of life and to realize that to become someone worth becoming, I probably need to be doing things I don’t want to be doing.

What might that mean for you?
Instead of watching TV tonight, maybe you need to attend that meeting.
Instead of writing another email that glosses over the problems, maybe you need to show up at her house.
Instead of continuing to assume that seminar wouldn’t work for you like it’s worked for them, maybe you need to sign up and take it.
Instead of hoping it won’t happen again, maybe you need to confess your sin so you have a friend making sure it doesn’t happen again.
To become a freedom fighter, you must be free. Again, you can’t give away something you don’t have. So first you need to fight for your own freedom.

Second, Jen focused intensely on other people. One of my favorite people from American history is Harriet Tubman. She was born into slavery and lived in it until 1849 when she took her emancipation into her own hands, escaping north to Philadelphia from a plantation in Maryland. The first thing she did once she escaped was … go back. She returned to Maryland to free her sister and her sister’s family. She returned again to free three of her brothers. Then again to free her parents. She ended up returning on eighteen or nineteen rescue missions, bringing a total of over two hundred people out of slavery. That totally makes her a hero. And in one sense I think it’s amazing that once free, she didn’t decide to just play it safe and enjoy her freedom. But in another sense I think, how could she not return? I mean, if you’ve spent your life in the horrors of slavery and you know that people are still trapped in it, don’t you have to go back?

As soon as Jen began finding freedom from her depression, she started focusing intensely on other people. Every time she heard about some woman who was struggling with hopelessness, she would go back. She returned to teach classes for women in our church on how to find freedom from despair. When she was asked to speak to pastors’ wives at conferences, she shared her story of slavery to depression and showed them the path to emancipation.
It certainly would have been easier for Jen to just enjoy her freedom. It’s never fun to enter into the darkness of another person’s depression. Having to repeatedly go back and relive painful memories is, well, painful. But Jen chose to focus intensely on other people.

Have you made that choice? Maybe you’ve gotten through something and when you did you thought, I am leaving that behind and will never return. And that’s a great way of thinking … for selfish jerks.

If we actually care about people(other than ourselves) we can’t leave our problems behind and never return. If we don’t take the freedom we’ve experienced and try to bring it to others, we are not becoming people worth becoming. What we’re becoming is the center of a very small universe that is not worth living in because we have to live with ourselves in it. If that’s where you’ve been living, it is imperative that you get the heck out of Dodge. And if you’re leaving and wondering where you should go, go back. Return to the people who are struggling with problems you’ve gone through, people in pain you can relate to, people wrestling with issues you’ve dealt with.

The reason we need to do this is simple yet profound. It has nothing to do with our happiness and everything to do with our wholeness. Really, it’s about who we are: freedom fighters.