What I Have Learned About Freedom
I have spent much of my life misunderstanding freedom.
Like a lot of people, I once thought freedom meant being able to do what I wanted. To make my own decisions. To go where I wanted to go. To say yes or no without anyone controlling me. And there is some truth in that. A person who is controlled, manipulated, threatened, or trapped is not free in any meaningful sense.
But the longer I live, the more I realize that autonomy by itself is not the same thing as freedom.
A person can have options and still be a slave.
You can have money and still be controlled by fear. You can have a platform and still be controlled by approval. You can be surrounded by people and still be controlled by loneliness. You can have the right to say no and still be unable to say it because guilt has trained your mouth to say yes.
That has been part of my story.
For many years, I cared deeply about people. At least that is what I called it. And much of it was care. I do not want to dismiss the genuine love, concern, and compassion that were part of me. But I also know now that some of what I called love was fear. Some of it was guilt. Some of it was the need to be approved of. Some of it was the terror of disappointing people.
As a pastor, that became especially complicated. People had expectations. Some were spoken. Many were not. Be at the hospital. Be at the funeral. Be available. Be strong. Be kind. Be spiritual. Be present. Be whatever someone needed you to be in the moment they needed it.
And when you are naturally empathetic, those expectations can feel like a calling.
But they can also become a cage.
I learned to show up for people while slowly disappearing from myself. I learned to carry burdens that were not mine to carry. I learned to confuse being needed with being faithful. I learned to call self-abandonment love.
That is not freedom.
Freedom is not merely having the ability to choose. Freedom is having enough consciousness, courage, and discipline to choose what is good, even when guilt wants something else. Freedom is being honest enough to admit what is true. Freedom is being disciplined enough not to become a slave to every expectation, appetite, resentment, fear, or desire that rises inside you.
Freedom is not just the absence of chains.
Freedom is the presence of a rightly ordered soul.
That kind of freedom is costly. It may cost you approval. It may cost you access to certain relationships. It may cost you the false peace that comes from keeping everyone pleased. It may even cost you the version of yourself people preferred because that version was easier for them to use.
So maybe the real question is not whether we want to be free.
Maybe the real question is this:
What are we willing to lose in order to stop living as a prisoner of what other people expect us to be?
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