The Perfect Utterance

The arrival of this new season has announced itself with the echoes of gunfire reverberating around the world, mingled now with the loud voices of the affluent and the silence of solidarity; the minor fall of tragedy and the major lift of a new resolve. This is the birdsong of freedom, and the marching beat of united man to preserve it. Times where each person has a response, everyone a stake in collective freedom.

But, it seems, the entire nature of that freedom is being shaken out and turned upside down.

We stand fighting for freedom of speech, and yet we’re slaves to the fear of what might become with every next move. We’re defending this liberty as something indivisible, as something that gives us the right to be who we want, do what we want, speak how we like, to whoever we like. We’re marching off the back of tragedy with new breath in our lungs, the crowds standing together to protect the right to use our voices to sing to whatever rhythm we want. Marching to the rhythms of war drums and singing our songs of revolution.

But surely, in every song, the musicians have a responsibility. Each man and woman a piece of the orchestra; they have freedom to sing and to play in whatever key they want, but yet, for the sake of producing the harmonious masterpiece, they choose to play together, with one key, with one accord.

Freedom of speech is something worth protecting. But if we, as the songwriters and musicians in this world, use that freedom to play in our own key, we will only ever produce discord and clamor. By definition, we will be free, in that we can use the pulpit to offend or to encourage; to break down or build up; to defame or to love. But with the collective freedom, comes the collective responsibility. Our voice can be used for ill or for good, to produce a perfect melody or a discordant mess.

These tragic days have taught us the far reaching power of our freedom, for better or worse. Yet, in defending that freedom, it is all too easy to become imprisoned by the chains of fear and arrogance; fear for what our words may create, and arrogance as to our liberty to use them however we like.

On our tongues is a song of freedom, the choice to make a perfect utterance.

It’s time we used our song, our little utterance, to create something beautiful out of the ashes of these times. To proclaim freedom for the captives, and release for the prisoner, to speak out for the afflicted. To shed tears with the families of Parisian victims, to cry with thousands left despairing in Nigeria, to mourn with the children of Syria.

And then, with one accord, it is our time to take up our song born from the collective freedom. Not a freedom that breaks down and tramples on others. A freedom born in love, in keeping with justice, in hope. Hope for a world bright with the exultant out pour of sons and daughters singing in one united key.

Our song can change the world. With that responsibility, we can be the singers who end this world’s poverty, bring about peace in the ruins of violence, and build from the dust the freedom for all to coexist together in peace, without regard for race, religion or any other factor.

Harbored Hearts

Moored to the harbor of my heart sit many tall ships, carried to this place by the winds that sail the seas of this life. Treasures and cargoes aboard, many things from places far abroad are stacked up in great piles at my docks. They enter into me, they are stored like great burdens in my mind. At anchor between me and the world, these ships seem lost far from home, lost from places far away where there are no city lights to guide them back, taking shelter in the craggy shoreline of my soul.

Their anchors cast down into the depths of my waters, their mooring lines grappled down into the heart like great weights. There are things I thought set sail from here long ago, but it seems they’ve returned in fleets, ravaging the coasts of my conscience. Things I thought I had freedom from have made the lonesome journey back in droves.

A guilty conscience is a heavy thing to bear, and these worldly troubles shored up like many boats to my heart’s enclosed harbor make for troublesome company. With each new step, the burdens grow deeper; news of a outside world in despair are the talk of the docks. Freedom from these old and heavy hulls is inviting, but seems so far off. Yearning for the clearness and the calm waters of the once ago, I look out from ivory watch towers for what could be.

Freedom. A state of content. Where is freedom to be found?

They tell me freedom is to be found in the best career. Freedom is to be truly attained by making a decent living for yourself. Its getting the bigger house, the better wage, the one up on your fellow working man.

Freedom, they say, is working harder than the student sat next to me that my future might burn a little brighter than there’s. Freedom, perhaps, bought into by an investment into the frocks and dresses that line the high street. Buying into the world’s fashions is where freedom is to be found, they tell me.

Yet I find no freedom where I look there. Those things are simply the clouds that prevent the ships from ever leaving my heart. You see, these boats that burden me so are the pride, the greed, the selfishness that moors up against my walls and keeps me down in guilt. I find no freedom in the proclaimed goods that the world offers; they simply darken the far off lighthouses that would lead away my burdens.

Where am I to look then? No thing that man has made would satisfy the yearning of a heart in the depths of many seas. Because the things that the world offers are simply trivial pursuits built on superficial goals. A happiness found there could never satisfy because they simply leave me yearning for more.

In this bleak condition, therefore, I look for salvation not in this world, but another. A place I could truly call home. And it is when Christ found me here wandering, that He proclaimed freedom to a this moored up soul.

Like the rushing of many tidal waves, these ships were cast off far away, destroyed under the waters, and freedom was done.

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

When I looked to the world for an answer, the only answer I got was a mirror of my own helplessness. So I looked to the man Jesus Christ, fully God. You see, God is Love.

And Love never fails. Love is freedom.

If I looked to my own selfish gain, there I would only find defeat and failure. In the not to distant shadow of the future, what achievement of my own would stand against the shackles of time? When this world’s pleasures are in their passing, what satisfaction can I ever find there?

Only Love stands against the fall, freeing this harbor heart from the anchors of worldly ships. I found true love in the eyes of a Savior. And it is in Love that I find my freedom.

So my life is a light for the cause of no other name but Jesus. A name that is a lighthouse, calling to His own heart the captive, the poor, the broken and the thief. Calling me home though the night storm to a day that knows no tears.

You are loved. Whatever judgement the world could proclaim on you could never fully justify your worth. Love is counter cultural, proclaiming freedom to those who the world calls the ugly, the sinful, the unworthy. Love sees through those superficial labels.

This is why I could never call the world truly home. No, my heart only finds discomfort and dissatisfaction in the seas of that place.

Instead, I found home in Love, Love that died for me, a man who wasn’t worth it, isn’t particularly special and something quite unspectacular.

It was that Love that calls me home to true freedom. A place I can really call home.

Love is taking back the things the world cast off as worthless, and on my journey home, I want it to know one thing:

Love is victorious.