Freedom

Little more than five years ago, I was standing with a buddy of mine in his driveway. As we were talking, we managed to get into an argument like we always did. I don't remember what it was about, but I remember him telling me something along the lines of, "You were more fun when you drank." I, of course, took this statement as permission to get loaded. So I did. Being new sobriety, I had no foundation. I didn't know what it took, and definitely wasn't doing anything about it. 

Life as a drunk is very pinball-ish. It doesn't take but one snide remark, one bill paid late, one criticism at work, or one missed opportunity to jump right back in to the obsessive compulsion to drink away my problems. It's a life of jumping from one emotional disturbance to the next, using alcohol as the means of survival and temporary peace and comfort. 
 

But the thing is, even when I stopped drinking, the problems didn't stop. If anything, they got worse because I didn't drink over them. And that's true misery. Wanting to drink but not doing it, and at the same time not having a solution to any of my problems is hell on earth. It's chaotic. It's the pinball times one hundred. 

So this went on for a year and a half. Wanting to drink, but not, and getting crushed by shame, debt, resentment, and fear. I was always on the verge of saying screw it and getting drunk all over again. 

Thankfully, there was an ending point to all of this. There was a point at which the option between life and death became a real thing. Stone cold sober, having not had a drink for over a year, I faced the decision between life and death. The pain I experienced forced me to make a decision: either continue on and kill myself, or try a different alternative. And the different alternative was the one I feared the most, yet I saw that it had worked in others. 

Not long after I started doing the work outlined in the book Alcoholics Anonymous, my constant emotional roller coaster was interrupted by something I'd never experienced before. It was a deep, overwhelming and mysterious sense that everything was gonna be alright. It was so abrupt and foreign to me that I was afraid of it at first. There was no chaos wrapped up in it, or fear, or shame. It was just pure, unadulterated peace, something so indescribably wonderful that it bolstered me to levels of serenity that I believe only happen in the early days of sobriety. 

Some people call it God's grace. Some call it joy. Some call it peace. Some call it the stars aligning or the universe being on one's side. Whatever it was, it was catapulting me through an obsession that I'd never been able to get rid of. For the first time, I could experience pain without wanting to drink over it. I could experience hardship without wanting to head to the liquor store. I could experience outward chaos without being swept away by inward turmoil.

And that's how it is today, more than five years later. 

I've learned that freedom doesn't come by not having any more problems, but comes when I can face my problems and not be swept away by them emotionally or spiritually. 

And at the same time, there's so many lies out there about freedom. 

There's the lie that freedom comes from limited government, or limited corporations, or limited both, or none of either one. 

There's the lie that saying some religious prayer or doing some religious ritual will relieve me of all my problems and set me free. 

There's the lie given by commercial after commercial telling me that I'll feel a little more free if I buy a new car, or a different shampoo, or wear that brand of jeans. 

There's the lie that freedom comes by getting a good education and setting myself up for financial success. 

There's the lie that finding the right woman or man will lead to freedom.

There's the lie that taking a loan out at the bank or getting that new credit card will set me free from financial worry. 

There's so many avenues claiming to have my freedom in mind, but none of them work. None of them have the ability to transform my heart in a way that only God can. 

I remember what it was like when I got my first credit card. I was so excited about getting a new pressure washer and starting my own business. But, if I would've known that starting a business matched with drinking most days and nights was gonna spell financial disaster, I probably wouldn't have made that choice. Yet, I did. And it was a mess. It took me years to unravel the damage that both my drinking and my credit card did to my financial "freedom."

The advertisers have figured out that people are grasping and gasping for freedom, so they insert free-sounding phrases like no money down and 0% interest* and lease to own and no payments for a year.

If you wanna find out where society invests the most in hopes of achieving freedom, pay attention to the commercials that are repeating the most. If people weren't picking up what they're putting out, the companies wouldn't be making the money to spend on commercials.

But what is true freedom?

True freedom comes at a cost, and I'm not talking about military victories. It comes with the destruction of self, and I can't use my twisted mind to achieve untwisted thinking. I have to have God's help.

And I'm not talking about the Bible God, or the Christian God, or the Islamic God or the Hindu God. I'm talking about a God personal to me, constructed upon my own wild imaginations and conceptions. My conception of God may share some of the same characteristics as those conceptions of God, but in the end they're different because they're mine. I can't use somebody else's conception of God to set me to freedom. I have to create my own, one that works in spite of my repeated failures and disappointments.

And so, freedom ends up being a way of life that starts in the mind and turns into action. It very rarely gets disturbed because it sees adversity through a lens of opportunity and spiritual experience. And when it does get disturbed, it doesn't run away but presses in even harder to find the peace hidden in the conflict. I believe today that there's always peace mixed in with conflict. There's always a slight mixture of chaos and serenity, death and resurrection, conflict and peace. And freedom quietly waits it out and does forensics and studies what's going on and finds away to extract the truth from any given situation.

So, when you turn on talk radio, or watch the news, or read the newspaper today, remember that most of the world around us is gasping and grasping for cheap freedom. But we don't have to live like that. There is a solution. There's real freedom available whenever we want it enough, or when circumstances make us willing enough.