When God Is Free to Be

by Lucia Sweetland

 

What does it mean to be free? What does it mean for God to be free? What kind of bondage could God experience? Bondage is slavery or involuntary servitude. Many of us are enslaved to the things of this world. For example, perhaps we spend hours watching television or communicating on Internet social sites and can't stop. Or maybe we can’t function without our coffee, our cigarettes or our favorite junk food. Many of us feel we cannot live without a certain loved one - a friend, a mate or a pet. For each one of us there is at least one thing that we think we cannot live without – and that one thing is our master. What would it be like to be master of ourselves, and how do we get there? Unfortunately, we cannot get there without being willing to give up – or surrender - that which we think we cannot live without. When we are willing to surrender everything and everyone, then we are free.

Overcoming

Some people have experienced finding a new freedom after facing and overcoming a deep fear they have. For example, someone who is afraid of heights may find the courage to learn how to skydive. In facing long-held fears or phobias it is important to go slowly because the energy that is built up in these fears is very strong and can easily overwhelm us. It is never God’s way to violently force us to face something that we are not ready for. We don’t want to tarry or procrastinate, but neither do we want to rush. Just moving forward one step at a time is God’s way to heal. God wants us to have our victory.

It is a victory to overcome our fears because our fears enslave us. They make us behave in certain ways or they inhibit our behavior, preventing us from doing things that we could naturally do with ease and joy if we were not so filled with fear – things such as public speaking. Those who have faced their fears and overcome them know that the fear itself was worse than the thing they imagined could happen that they felt they could not handle, such as forgetting the words to their speech.

Our fear makes us experience certain imagined negative outcomes over and over and over with no way of handling them because they are not happening right now! We are just imagining them happening and projecting that image into our future. Our fears create negative overlays on situations, projecting the absolute worst from a position of powerlessness. Yet because our fears are so energetically strong and convincing, they create a sort of vortex that sucks us in, and we get entrapped in extremely uncomfortable and self-defeating thought and emotional patterns. Does this sound like a form of bondage? Well, it sure is.

God would have us be free of fear. Fear is the anti-thesis to God’s Love. Love fills us up and moves us forward to be more. Fear holds us back in less. And this is how God is not free. Oh, God is always free in the larger sense, but God desires to be free to express through us! How can God express through us if we are trapped in fear?

Surrendering

This brings us back to surrender. Many of us actually have a fear of surrender! We think that surrender means giving up something that we need. Yet what do we need outside of God? What if all outer need is a lie? Doesn't attachment stem from the belief that we don't have all that we need in God - that we are not Whole within? Haven’t we all experienced losing something that we thought we needed only to find out that we didn’t need it after all? If we have lost someone that was deeply dear to us and felt bereft at their absence, did we turn to God to be filled? Or did we try to go it on our own without turning to the source of all love, all fulfillment, all support and all comfort right within our own hearts?

Yet being willing to surrender something does not necessarily mean doing without it because we are not actually surrendering the person or object; we are surrendering our sense of ownership and attachment, which is what creates the bondage. Because everything belongs to God, we cannot own anything anyway. When we are cleared of our sense of ownership and need, God may give back to us what we have surrendered - for safekeeping or stewardship. When we are free "of" whatever enslaves us, God within us is free "to" be. So we see that freedom is not about having what we think we need, it is about being who we are.

Dear God,

In love and trust,
I surrender all;
I AM Freedom
To Be.