Is Freedom Granted or Claimed? (Bot9 #332)
Have you ever had a question that you wish you had asked someone? I am sure there are many running through your mind from the serious to the curious. For me, I had a question pop in my head a couple of weeks ago. Thankfully, I could ask the question to the person via the technology of a text message.
We won a state championship in 2016. The last out of that game is the image above. I was replaying the final moment in my mind and I pictured our right fielder, Levi Walters, making the catch for the final out. After securing the catch, his hands shoot in the air and the dogpile begins. But the question I had never asked Levi was this, “What was it like to catch the last out in the state title game in 2016?”
I found his reply so striking.
“Most of that day feels like a blur! But I do remember as soon as that ball was hit, I felt relieved. It was like for a split second I was the only one that knew that ball would be caught and we had won!”
Isn’t that incredible? In the moment the ball is flying off the bat of the opposing hitter, he feels relief. Not doubt. Not fear. Relief. Confidence. Completing the goal. He claimed freedom in a moment where most of the human population would fail.
Now, let me also share that Levi’s not your average Joe. He’s the primary advisor to the company commander and will take leadership of his flight platoon of four Blackhawk helicopters and 25 soldiers in January. He’s proven himself as a leader among leaders at West Point. In a small way, I hope the freedom he claimed on the baseball field with us became the foundation for his future leadership.
It is appropriate for us to be grateful for the service of men like Levi. But there’s a lesson to learn here as well. While we pray thanks (rightfully so) for the freedom we have been given in our country, we actually have as many people living in some sort of bondage. When freedom is earned by the sacrifice of others, I wonder if many waste the opportunity to claim spiritual freedom because others did the work for us to live seemingly free lives.
Even though Paul writes in Galatians 5:1 “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free” and Jesus himself quotes the prophet Isaiah by saying He comes to “set the captives free,” we choose chains over freedom in so many ways. Secular wisdom and motivation like that shared by Steve Jobs in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford titled “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” also points us to claiming the freedom available to all of us. Jobs explains how he dropped out of college so he could drop in to classes he found interesting. This led him to a calligraphy class where he learned about typefaces that later became the fonts on the Macintosh and the computers we use to this day. Jobs said, “Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
This is another example of a person claiming freedom. It is self-evident that the granted freedom we have in our country makes room for someone to claim freedom. Yet there are millions of people in the country who choose not to claim the freedom granted to them. People will pick a line of work in a free country that doesn’t contribute to their spiritual freedom. Jobs goes on to say, “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”
The funny thing is that Jobs is speaking to people who have just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the best education available to them. I can imagine the pressure some of those in the audience felt in that moment as they reflected on the amount of money they spent and the uncertainty of their next steps. It reminds me of what Will says in Good Will Hunting, “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.” There’s some truth in Will’s statement, if you can claim the freedom available to each one of us. I’m not saying that we should all drop out, find some class in the liberal arts, and we’ll all become world influencers. But I do believe there is freedom available to us that could allow our lives to be a work of art in God’s hands.
To get there, we might have to die in order to live. It’s here where the words of Jesus and Steve Jobs sound quite similar. Jobs says, “Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.” A couple of thousand years before Jobs said this in front of a bunch of Stanford grads, Jesus said, “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John 12:24-25). This is the ultimate claim of freedom - die to yourself. Let go of whatever narrative you once had written for yourself and seek to read the story Jesus wrote for you at the beginning of time. When you claim that level of freedom, you can encourage others to do the same. You might just have the opportunity to encourage a young person who catches the final out of a state championship and moves on to impact those around him in a powerful way.