The
Long Road To Freedom
by Major Danielle
Strickland
I’ve been thinking about freedom for a long
time.
External freedom is one thing. It’s
essential. Anyone who has been a captive will tell you that to
be externally free is of utmost importance. But captivity and
oppression are not just external things. They can be internal
things, too—things deep inside of us. Things we learned to
survive, to help us through. Things that served us for a
while, but now keep us enslaved.
So, how does freedom work? Not just the
obvious freedom of a captive who finds their door unlocked.
Recently, I watched the film Hector and the Search for
Happiness, about a psychiatrist who searches the globe to find
the secret of happiness. In one scene, Hector is held prisoner
by African drug lords and is then released. He walks away
slowly, like he’s afraid someone is going to shoot him at any
moment. When he realizes he’s free, he begins to run and laugh
and shout and dance. It’s exhilarating. He writes in his
happiness journal that true happiness is freedom. And he’s
right.
As a child, my friend Hanna was trapped in a
pedophile ring, forced to do unspeakable things. That’s
slavery. That’s a real prison. The thing is, she’s been free
from that captivity for years, but she still struggles with
freedom. We need to be free on the outside and the inside. How
do we do that?
The truth is that slavery exists in each of
us.
The Israelites walked around a desert for 40
years after they were “free” from the oppression of the
Egyptians, but none of them seemed to think it was much of a
“freedom dance” they were doing. Commentaries suggest that the
40 years was about moving their freedom from the outside to
the inside. Does it take that long?
Hanna would agree, I think, with the people
of God, and with Nelson Mandela, that the road to freedom is a
long walk. Those of us who want simple, shallow answers to
complex truths (that’s most of us) often think Mandela was
free on the day he was released from prison. But that’s not
the case. As he says, freedom started much sooner, and took
much longer than that. What does that mean?
It means that freedom is complicated. Yes,
it’s about our external lives. And yes, it’s about our
internal lives. But it’s even more than that. It’s about those
parts of us being united together and contributing to the
world around us. It’s about living a different way—from the
inside out.
I want to live that way, but the truth is
that it’s a hard way to live. The truth is that slavery exists
in each of us. That freedom is elusive, difficult and
complicated. That the road to freedom is hard and long. That
to be truly free means to face truth, accept it, and be
authentic and vulnerable and open—and that is simply
terrifying.
To be free is to abandon yourself to a
greater being who knows you better than you know yourself. If
that’s how freedom works, then why not start today?
|