Free People: Aren’t Chained to Resentments

Take a moment and consider the worst thing that's ever been done to you.  A lie somebody told.  A wound they inflicted.  A treasure they stole.

We must never ignore that the harmful actions of others can have long-lasting effects on our lives.  It can be as overt as a bruise on a cheek and as insidious as a learned cynicism.

It's important to stand guard alongside our souls.  For while evil can set up camp easily in the mindset of weaker targets, it is the free in whom evil takes its greatest delight when narrowing its aim.  And if evil can execute a fall of the free, it's its most powerful achievement indeed.

Pain can lead to anger.  Persistent anger can become resentment.  Resentment can breed hopelessness.

Resentment is the boulder to which our feet are tied when revenge is our king.  It is the ocean by which we drown when we ignore the life vest of forgiveness.

Resentment is drilling a hole in your own boat and cursing it for sinking.

It's stiff-arming a medicine while lamenting your pain.

It's the dumbest gift you can hand over to your most squalid enemy--the keys to your soul,

your joy,

your life.

It auctions off the acreage of your heart to the ones who shouldn't be near it.

But how can resentment be stopped once it's begun its fiery stomping into your existence?

By opting to exist elsewhere.

During a rough stretch five years ago, I trained myself to spend the bulk of my time in activities where God was more apt to show up.  I chose mentally to be where He was and chose to be less where my fears or sadness could get the better of me.  When things of His nature consumed me, I wasted far less energy being befuddled and overwhelmed by circumstances that were out of my control.  I learned to U-turn my worry-prone heart toward His rest.  I prayed for peace by the minute until it felt more natural.  His words and His promises were my ever-worshipful soundtrack.  I studied examples of godly warriors who had emerged victorious on the other side of purported defeat.

And while not nearly as gratifying as the violent snap of a bolt cutter, the steadfastness I adopted chipped away at what I might have been and made space for the potential I held.

Thus, I have found that the best defense against resentment is commitment to good.

To the purposeful immersion in His uplifting love and grace.

To the tightened seatbelt of endurance when the road turns bumpy and unpaved.

To the acknowledgement that it's possible to become like your enemies.

To the vow that you'll never let it happen.

You are so much better than that.

Resentment, like a dirty room, must be tidied consistently for the mess not to overrun.  Untie your feet, patch the hole in your drowning boat, swallow the pill, and evict your disorderly tenants.

You have a choice--a say--in who runs your life.

And by golly, I hope that it's you.

Free People: Are Unafraid to Speak Truth to Stupid

Sometimes, people say and do the stupidest things (things that make you wanna make the face below...)

When I say "stupid," I'm not referring to a lack of education or ignorance.  I'm referring to the guttural stupidity that accompanies a lack of concern for other people.  Pathological dishonesty with no expectation of consequence.  Pure selfishness and a purposeful indifference to common decency.

It's alive and well in the damaged, hurting hearts of those who feel others should hurt, too.  It's there in the evil hearts, too, just for fun.

Any way you slice it, dice it, or recognize it, stupidity proliferates and thrives when we don't do anything about it.

If you aren't free, you'll be prone to silence.  I've been in situations like this--and I'm sure you have, too--where the behavior is so stupid and the offender is so difficult, that, though the answers and the recourse should be obvious, you're too paralyzed to act.

It requires guts to confront a superior, an elder, or a bully, so we let things pass in the name of martyrdom or in the observance of what has come to be "wussy forgiveness."

You know, wussy forgiveness.  The one where, out of the inability to speak truth, we just tell the behavior and the perpetrator "it's okay," and then we figure out how to make it "okay" going forward.

Stop calling stupid okay.  Stop calling evil okay.  It isn't okay.  And it won't be okay, no matter how many grace baths you give it.

Moses comes to mind when I think of this aspect of freedom.  God called long-forgotten, exiled-to-the-sheep, hobo little stuttering Moses to go and speak toPharaoh (the king) to tell him (yipe!) to free the Israelites.  At first, Moses resisted out of fear and insecurity, but he was his people's only hope.  So when he chose to obey, God's power came upon him, and he spoke freely to the most feared man in the land.  Pharaoh didn't listen, which was stupid.  He was too proud to listen to God.  Because he behaved stupidly, his people suffered for it time after time after time.  They were sick and couldn't drink their water, and their homes were overrun with frogs and locusts and other disturbances.  It eventually cost the kingdom lots of children, including Pharaoh's own son.

The world is full of people who charge full-steam ahead to do what they want, no matter what it costs or who it might hurt.  They might not stop because you tell them to, but you have to try.

We must feel the freedom to speak up in the little things.  We must feel even more urging in the big things, even when it's hard.

Especially when it's hard.

I think of the young girls violated by the Olympic doctor, and all of the opportunities that were missed to do something about it.  I think of the children and teachers who don't confront or turn in bullies, only to have school shootings or suicides result.  I think of the friends and family who sit idly by, watching spouses cheat or drink themselves into oblivion, only to have a family come to ruin.

Think of the destruction that could be spared all around if we stopped ignoring and making excuses for these blatant wrongdoings.

Free people don't make excuses for stupidity.

If you speak up, the person might not stop.  But if you don't, they absolutely won't.

Don't be afraid.  Don't be silent.  Be bold.  Have courage.  Be free to stand up to what shouldn't be.

You never know what or who you might save.

Free People: Aren’t Easily Offended

"He who takes offense when no offense is intended is a fool, and he who takes offense when offense is intended is a greater fool." - Brigham Young

Freedom requires thick skin.

Have you ever touched actual thin skin?  I've seen some of the thinnest skin possible in my career because I work with babies born as prematurely as 23 and 24 weeks gestation.  I'm convinced the only reason I was able to get my first IV start ever as a new nurse was because of my one-pounder's transparent skin--I could see every running network of every vein he had.  All NICU nurses know that if you have to start an IV, you want a baby with thinner skin because it's easier to get access to them--it's a little like having a permanent X-ray.  If they are born early enough, their skin is even gelatinous.  They can't protect themselves from heat loss.  The most dreadful IV attempts happen with full-term, fully-padded babies with dense, dry skin.  You often can't see any veins at all (a "blind stick" is the worst), and even if you can see their vessels, their thick skin makes accessing and cannulating their veins virtually impossible at times.

So consider your own "skin"--is it immature and thin?  Does your sensitivity to even the slightest offenses read like a permanent X-ray of weakness?  Does it take one tiny stick to access all of the inner-workings of who you are?  Are you an "easy stick?"

Or do you make the people poking at you really work for it?  Are you padded with self-confidence and a sense of humor?  Are offenders forced to try their hand at you from multiple angles to get at you--only to have them give up?  Are you a "tough stick?"

May we all learn the freedom of beinginaccessible to the snap of a snarky comment.

And while physical harm is cause for revolt, if the only thing that stands to get hurt from an action is your feelings, I hope you reevaluate the need to suckle upon it like the nourishment for a newborn baby.

Free people don't go out of their way to experience offense.

I don't know many of us who haven't seen the circulating YouTube video of the pastor sharing the story of a man who shrugged off an offense with the statement, "I can afford it."  If you have the time, Google it for a heartwarming anecdote.  Otherwise, I'll break down the bottom line for you here: when your worth and happiness don't depend on the actions of others, you can afford to take the "hit" of an offensive remark made toward you.

Not all stinging commentary is an insult.  Is it true?  Own up to it and fix it.  Is it an assumption?  Correct it loudly by living differently.  Is it funny?  Learn to laugh at yourself.

And if it's clearly intended to be an insult?  For the love of all that is holy on heaven and earth, just ignore it.  Retaliating or snapping back is only evidence that you've let them tap a vein.

What if we stopped scavenging through intentions and inflections for hidden assaults...

...and just let words linger in the air?

What if we stopped taking nastiness seriously?

So what if people try to be mean?  So what if they don't mean to be mean and end up being mean?

Hide your veins and fatten your skin with freedom.  Don't go looking for offense, and if it finds you anyway, be free to tell it to get lost.

So long, thin skin.

Hello, freedom.

Free People: See Beauty Where Others Do Not

The summer before I got pregnant with Harlow, I developed a voracious appetite for reading.  In three months, I had devoured eight books, including gems like The Help and The Secret Life of Bees.  There are two things I remember most clearly from what I read:

(1) The chocolate pie encounter with Miss Hilly in The Help (gah, that's a good scene).

and

(2) A description of a skunk's odor fromThe Lovely Bones.

For those of you unfamiliar with the latter story, it follows the Salmon girl ("Salmon like the fish; first name Susie"), as her spirit roams the heavens and the earth after she's been raped and murdered by Mr. Harvey, an older man who lived on the route to her school.

Susie enjoys this smell most of us find horrifyingly putrid.  In fact, she loves it so much, it's the aromatic backdrop for her version of heaven.  Alice Sebold writes as Susie, "The air in my heaven often smelled like skunk--just a hint of it...It was the animal's fear and power mixed together to form a pungent, lingering musk" (p. 15). 

It was the first time I'd ever heard beauty applied to a bad smell.  And all these years later, when a skunk's stench of attempted survival permeates the air of our winding country backroads, I think of Susie Salmon.  I consider the fear, I consider the power.  I search for the beauty.

It still stinks, but it's somehow more palatable.

Anything can be ugly from the right angle.

Winter in its nakedness.  Dimples of weight that can only be found and never lost.  Words slung in fear or hatred.

The unfree have but one lens with which to view beauty--it's either suited to the symmetry of their hopes and expectations, or it's a blundering, blubbering, ugly, obliterated pile of scraps.  They lack the perspectives that give us life's odd and striking beauties.  They don't understand it, and so to them, it can't be good.

When your heart becomes unfettered--untortured by the illusion of what should be and clasping endlessly to an unshaped lump that can be molded with care--the possibilities become limitless.

Freedom takes the scarcity of January and reforms it into the appreciation of June.

It turns a puddle into a splash pad.

It takes fat and saggy skin and stretch marks and refreshes them into challenges and goals--or even into battle scars from a life lived distantly from the sidelines.

Freedom finds beauty even in the hurling ugliness of an enemy--by seeing a charge to be an ambassador for goodness and not succumbing to the pansied doormat of victimhood.

Freedom gives new mothers the chance to find beauty in elongated, bruised, and squashed faces.

It morphs the sting of a horrible diagnosis into the joy of formerly insignificant things.

It takes splinters and thorns and nails and the agonizing cry of death and blows it as a triumphant victory cry for those of us who'd otherwise have no hope.

The lens of the unfree is picky.  The lens of the free swoops and sifts and narrows until it finds an opportunity,

a reminder,

a challenge,

an anything 

so as to be intentionally and perpetuallysurrounded by light.

Anything can be beautiful if you look at it from the right angle.  Even a stinky skunk.

You need only the freedom to see it.