I wish I knew how it would feel to be free
I wish I could break all the chains holding me
I wish I could say all the things that I should say
Say ‘em loud say ‘em clear
For the whole wide world to hearI wish I could share
All the love that’s in my heart
Remove all the bars that keep us apart
And I wish you could know how feels to be me
Then you’d see and agree that every man should be free
(Lighthouse Family- Free)
It’s not that life’s not good.
It’s really not… because I love my God and my friends and my course and rev and my brownies. Because nothing is particularly bad, or hard… or nothing ought to be, anyway. Perhaps I’m just preoccupied and selfish…
But I just feel trapped by something. Or by lots of things… Something’s holding me back- that thing which makes me hate myself, be scared of people, and which in turn stops me from really seeing people, really listening, really loving- as I was talking about in my blog entry after Youth Assembly.
I wonder, still, what it really means to be free. I’m under no illusions, I’m not expecting a constant high, I’m not expecting to never be frightened, to think I’m great all the time… But I want so desperately to be free to love truly… and i think that to do that I need to learn to live with myself- the question is, how on earth does one go about doing that? How do I liberate myself? Or perhaps more appropriate, how can I be liberated? Or perhaps it’s a combination of the two… Probably, I think. One day, I hope, I’ll be so free that I soar through the metaphorical skies. And perhaps in doing that I’ll be able to learn to be freeing- not that I’d presume to have ‘freeing power’ in the manner of God, that’d be ridiculous. But I’d like to learn to be a person who brings laughter and reconciliation, and who can suffer with the suffering, who can be realistic about pain and anguish and brokenness, who can be honest and frank yet gracious, which I think are some of the marks of true freedom. I guess they’re some of the things I see in Jesus, the free-est and most freeing reality, and also in God-given friendship.
The song I quoted above is helpfully medley-ed with U2’s one. The lyrics go like this:
One love one blood
One life you’ve got to do what you should
One life with each other
Sisters, brothersOne love but we’re not the same
We got to carry each other, carry each other
My sisters and brothers and my Lord carry me daily. I think they’re carrying me toward freedom. I think that they know how it feels to be me and that one day i’ll be so free that i’ll be able to share all the love in my heart and more… I hope so, anyway. And I think that’s true of many people- people who have so much love but are scared to show it or who’re too trapped to know what it really feels like to live… I want to carry them and have them carry me- in one love- the love- Jesus.
