Imagine Being Genuinely Free
I’ve been doing a lot of heavy heart work this year around my dating life, my past family wounds, and how to love myself through my anxieties and insecurities. And I keep coming back to this theme of freedom. Genuine, authentic, lively freedom. I feel like, deep down, every human being longs to be free. We long to be free from actual, literal bondage, and - if we struggle with any kind of addiction or ailment, or anything else we wish didn’t plague us - I can’t imagine that any of us don’t want genuine relief.
I feel like freedom is something way more interior than exterior to our circumstances. But at the same time, I think that as we embrace the freedom within, we find the power and resolve to bring about that same freedom to our surroundings, and those around us. I find that when I know I’m genuinely free, deep down, than I can spread that joy and good news with others, and hope to help them taste a bit of it too.
I’ve been following some pretty incredible accounts on Instagram these days, and one of them is by a man named Jimmy Darts. This man is a believer in Jesus and is using money as a means of blessing those in deepest need. I love what he’s doing, because he’s helping to unlock the kind of powerful, unmerited generosity and kindness that we all long to receive, and he does it with such joy and embrace of others.
And why would someone desire to give back to others in that way? I can only imagine that his generosity is fueled by a kindness within himself that he’s found and held onto. It’s a kindness that he extends to himself, that he receives from his Heavenly Father, and is therefore compelled to share with others. That kind of kindness is what we can have access to when we know that we’re genuinely, truly free.
And that freedom, all I can explain it as is feeling like the entire sky is in my soul. One of my good friends from college, Avery, told me once that she felt like the entire state of Montana (an absolutely breathtaking state) was in her soul. What a beautiful picture of freedom. Something so vast, so expansive, so without limits, being able to be experienced inside of someone limited, finite, and only able to hold so much.
Think about it then! If you know and experience and have tasted genuine freedom to that extent inside of you, you can’t help but extend that joy to others! It’s out of the overflow of our hearts that others can experience and touch that same freedom inside of us. Inside of me, and you.
So I want you to take a moment right now and imagine being genuinely free. What does that look like for you? What kinds of joys and genuinely good things would you be experiencing? What does having the whole state of Montana in your soul look like? How does that make you feel? And now imagine, what if you lived in that expansiveness place all the time? Every day?
I feel compelled with the platforms that I have to invite others into genuine, amazing freedom. And that’s because of the radical generosity and kindness I’ve received from others, from God Almighty, and from myself. Taste and see that freedom today. It’s so, so good.
