"Freedom"

Aaron and Christine Passomore will be joining Youth World as Team Leaders in June.  
Recently, he shared the following with our team...

A couple of weeks ago I was headed to my last teen boys’ retreat in the Juvenile Hall in Tijuana.  As we were undergoing our pat down and security search in order to enter, I watched a very interesting scenario.  A young boy named Eduardo was led out of the cells and given a change of clothes.   After he changed to street clothes he was quickly ushered past us as we waited to enter the main courtyard.  We as a staff knew him and were excited to see his time to leave had finally come after three long years.

What happened next was what I found so interesting.  The guards took him to the steel sliding door, slid it open, he walked through, and they slid it shut behind him.  There was nobody there to meet him, no fanfare, and in his mind really no direction for him to go.  So he took two steps away from the gate and then he turned and looked longingly back through the bars that now separated us.  Instead of a look of excitement or freedom, he looked lost and fearful.

This really struck me as odd!  Here he was, free after three years, only to find him-self imprisoned in his freedom.  He had no clue where to go because he was stuck in what was his past.  I think that many times we find ourselves imprisoned in our own freedom.  Why is that?  We stand staring back through the bars when we should just embrace the freedom God has given us. 

We need to look forward to what God has for us.   I know this is not a new idea, but young Eduardo reminded me of that basic part of salvation.  God has given us freedom and we need to live in it fully.  As we live and serve the Lord may we live looking away from the bars and not staring back through them.