Shackled Living

I was remembering the pretzel bag.
The brown bag with the handles that went around each day in elementary school.
It was a prized job to be the pretzel boy or the pretzel girl.
The chance to buy a soft pretzel to curb the hunger that inevitably struck mid-morning.

I never had the job, nor bought the pretzel.
I was an eraser clapper kind of girl.
I loved to take the erasers outside at the end of the day and clap the chalk dust off of them.
To each his own, I presume.

The pretzel bag went around the classroom as most of us were doing our seat work.
I remember that the cost of the pretzel could be paid for in change.
That change was given to the pretzel girl or boy.
The pretzel girl or boy threw the change into the same bag as the pretzels.

Money, hands touching money, and food were all in the same bag.
No one cared.
No one got sick.
Pretzels were bought the next day and the next.

We were a generation that drank from water hoses on a hot summer day.
We were a generation that thought nothing of riding two on a bike with no helmet.
We were a generation that sat three in the front seat of a car, with no seat belts.
We were a generation that stayed outside for much of the day, until dinnertime.

We survived.
In fact, we thrived.
We passed notes in class, we whispered behind raised desk lids until we were caught.
We wore sneakers: Keds for girls and Chuck Taylors for boys.

We ate butter and eggs and drank whole milk.
We were groomed by a little bit of our mother’s spit to manage a cowlick.
Girls wore hats and gloves at Easter.
Boys wore suits that made them look like their fathers.

We walked to school, carried lunch boxes, and wore knee socks with skirts.
Baseball cards were traded, football on the lawn was played, and bikes were ridden.
We were a generation that saw the assassination of a president.
We were a generation that landed on the moon.

Nothing was beyond our grasp.
Our teenage years were during a tumultuous time where everything was said to be free.
The promised freedom had an exorbitant cost.
In that freedom, we lost ourselves.

In that freedom, we lost God.
He remained the same.
He never moved.
A generation moved away from Him.

He didn’t offer the same kind of freedom that the world offered.
He was too restrictive.
His rules were antiquated.
Following Him meant that we were out of touch with the culture around us.

We never entertained the thought that it was the culture that was out of touch.
We never imagined that the freedom so many craved was actually enslaving us.
We were determined to do things better by ourselves.
We actually streamlined and modernized ourselves into loneliness.

It was as if the two were mutually exclusive.
We can’t have God and have it all, we foolishly thought.
We can’t have anything tying us down.
We quickly learned that freedom isn’t free.

Live as free men, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as servants of God.
(1 Peter 2:16)

We cast off the shackles that once bound us.
We cast them off for another kind of shackle.
A shackle of autonomy.
We cast off the One who made us and fashioned us to be free only in Christ.

So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. (John 8:36)

We cast off prayer in schools.
We cast off the sacredness of life for the expediency of personal choice.
We moved away from family and filled our calendars with activities.
We stayed so busy that we never had time to think of the loneliness and the isolation.

We threw God’s law behind our back and thought that we could do it all on our own.
We tossed aside any hint of absolutes and replaced them with relativism.
Tolerance meant nothing unless your tolerance agreed with mine.
Threats to businesses, homes, and finances happened because of our conviction.

The freedom to be Free is not something society understands.
We have dismissed the only One who can give us true Freedom.
We have searched high and low for progressive ways to improve society.
We are failing, miserably.

Nothing is hopeless.
In Christ there is always Hope.
We have to be willing to admit that our societal experiment is not working.
We have to admit that we have one Master, one Lord, and it is not ourselves.

In order to go forward we must go back.
We must end the loneliness and isolation by intentionally living out one-anothering.
We must have less time inside and more time outside serving others.
We must take off the shackles of progressivism and put on the yoke of Christ.

We were sold a bill of goods that, sadly, we are still buying.
It is not working.
We need men and women of courage to say, Enough!
We must raise a collective voice and say, No!

Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. (Jeremiah 6:16)

True freedom is found only in Jesus Christ.
It is time to say, No, to shackled living.
It is time to say, Yes, to the only Freedom that is truly Free.
Yes to Christ; No to the bill of goods that the world offers for the price of our souls.

 

2 responses to “Shackled Living”

1. Love your line about tolerance meaning nothing unless it agreed with mine. So very timely.

   Reply

   • Cathy,
     Tolerance, as defined in the dictionary, means: a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, beliefs, practices, racial or ethnic origins, etc., differ from one’s own. How far we have come from even the dictionary definition of the word.
     Gina

     Reply