What is Your Freedom Story?

What is the freedom narrative where you live? Where I live, between June 19 and July 4 there resumes the ongoing debate about freedom. Who is free? Are we really free? Who remain the oppressors? Who remain the oppressed? The attention is on the themes of history being repeated.

Free. It’s one of those words that comes with strings, although the connotation says there are no bonds. Free, with conditions. Whenever the anniversaries pass of important “freedom days,” all over again we contend to find our place in the freedom story. We revisit our convictions and beliefs. We struggle with ideas of justices and realities that contradict. We may experience an array of feelings about freedom, who is free, who is really free, who oppresses, and who is oppressed.

Then, there are the sons of God, and the chasm that forms between facts and history, and how we reconcile those facts to the liberating gospel of Jesus. Do our politics change? Do our views change? Are our passions and claims about injustice quelled in the light of His glorious grace? What does a living faith in Jesus Christ mean for our freedom stories?

We have to make peace with our anger, our disappointment, our success, our breakthroughs, and our beliefs. We have to take what we feel and experience and somehow bring it to the table of reasoning with what is true about the Lord. What we feel and experience is real…and it is subjective, though many may identify with the same or similar feeling and experience. What is true about the Lord is objective; it is true regardless of what we feel and experience.

So, for the sons of God, there is another set of questions and decisions to confront. These questions and decisions force us into deep introspection. Does my faith place higher than my race? What is my role in the justice movement? As a son of God and a disciple of Jesus, do I fall into the chorus of race-based religion? Or, do I plant my feet in the objective truths of the Scripture that cannot return to Him void?

As the freedom days on our calendar pass from year to year, please, I implore us, check our inner noise makers and reflect. Make peace with the divides in our souls about who we are, what we believe, and the value of our freedoms. In the intersection of these and other thoughts, we will find God. We will strip away the noise of our influences and look our freedom stories in the face.

Whatever we find, I pray sincerely that all discoveries lead us to the anchoring, life-giving, peace-full objective truths of the living Christ. Selah.

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Dr. Shaunta Scroggins is the lead contributor to The Bereans’ Commentary.