Audacious Simplicity of Freedom

One of the great mysteries that amuses me most about life is that lessons learned can be re-learned. Most of the time they should be re-learned because maybe they were not learned fully to begin with. This re-learning is what makes living so fulfilling.

Just recently I got to re-learn. Each Sunday, Kenny and I get to teach a lively group of little ones about Jesus. They have smaller bodies than the college students I work with daily, but the similarities between the two people types are startling. But that's besides the point.

We start each gathering with songs and a story. The kids were ushered into a large room and instructed to sit inside of a large square marked with blue painters tape. Since our numbers were smaller, they were allowed to sit WHEREVER they wanted...as long as it was within the blue tape boundary. I watched, fascinated as a blonde six-year-old wandered around inside the blue tape, an overwhelmingly confused look on her little face. Wherever she wanted? Not in the first grade row like normal? Other kids followed suit. Their agitated expressions gave away their thoughts. The simplicity of freedom was so great, they were paralyzed.

And then I recalled all the ways in which I've lived this way.

When my aunt took me on a ten-year-old excursion to the newest girls' clothing store and told me that I could pick out whatever I wanted. Her offer was so generous that I didn't know how to say yes. And once I said yes, where did I even start?

When God offered me complete forgiveness and favor in exchange for the self-inflicted guilt I quietly struggled with for years. Not just wiped clean, but an co-heiress of Christ, a delight to God? When I look forward into the future and have the realization that I absolutely have the freedom to make decisions (confidently!) within the larger boundaries of His written Word. I do not need to live in fear that I might make a wrong choice and fall off the map of His favor. He pursues me, I respond in obedience to His grace, and his gift to me is freedom.

Can it be that the great truths, the glorious simplicities, are God's most generous gifts to His people, yet they will not be received? How deeply that must hurt him to generously offer gifts yet have the objects of His great affection shake their heads and push them away.

 I want to have the audacity to receive freely with both hands and a thankful heart the  outrageous freedom my Father gives. It blesses the Giver and overjoys the receiver. I want to stop apologetically coming to Him with my neediness in exchange for grace. I want to say yes to expectant faith with wide eyes of anticipation and excitment. I don't want to tiptoe inside the boundaries, paralyzed by the ability to choose. I want to skip around inside the wide open space of grace. I want to say yes to the audacious simplicity of freedom.