SKATING WITHOUT WINGS

Thursday April 8th 8:13pm...
Today has been a very wonderful day. Not only was the weather gorgeous but I feel like I chalked a good amount of success. I began the day a little early especially since I went to bed rather late. I got on the train and immediately started to feel the same darn feeling I feel when I get on the train. It is this unexplainable feeling of struggling to focus but just feeling like I can't. I have been having these feelings for a while and I have been blaming a myriad of things from the vitamins I take up to my personal guilt. It's not a feeling I like and I try so hard to combat it but most of the time nothing helps.


I try to pray but when I do, I find that I struggle to find the words to pray which then leads me to work even harder to think and focus which is the very thing I am praying about. And so I am left feeling much worse than before. This morning I heard a voice that told me to stop and just not think or pray or do anything so I decided to do just that and that felt just great. I then decided to play a sermon on my iPhone now converted to iPod to try to relax. I wanted to hear a sermon on James I had heard a couple of months ago one that I had shared with a few people because I thought it would help them.


As I remembere it, it gave a really unique perspective on freedom that I had erstwhile not heard before. It was the idea that to live and experience true freedom is to actually live within boundaries and restrictions. When I had first heard this preached I was really shocked because my idea of freedom suggested that I could do whatever I wanted without any restrictions and setbacks I had never thought of fredom as living within the right set of restrictions. The preacher illustrates his point using the idea of a fish in water. Scientific knowledge teaches that the gills and fins of a fish are adapted for aquatic life and aquatic life alone. The fish may not like the dullness and monotony of aquatic living and may constantly crave freedom from the humdrum. If one day, the fish sees a hot, dry pavement and decides, “Here is land, I will jump on it and be free” we all know what will happen. At the very least, it will suffocate and die eventually succumbing to the mere laws that govern its existence.


Modern definitions of Freedom suggests a release from the obedience of laws and requirements; So that we resist laws and oppose anything that places any kind of restriction on our ability to do what we like or want. The definition is widely accepted but what if like the fish on the pavement we are wrong and that the real definition of freedom is living under and obeying the correct set of laws, rules and regulation and not just resisting or discarding them.


Let's think about it, If the fish decides to stay in water, will it be under laws of aquatic respiration? Absolutely! But will it die? Of course Not! rather it will experience the total freedom to continue living, breathing and swimming graciously as a fish. Perhaps we should learn to appreciate freedom under the frame work of the right type of laws to obey rather than as an oppressive restrictive denial of seemingly good things.


later in the afternoon after school I experienced something quite refreshing and somewhat corroborative of this lesson of living under the right kind of laws. I was in the park because the day was quite nice, so much so that I didn't care peppering a volleyball in my clinic attire. I didn't care who saw me wearing a button down shirt and tie and shoes playing volleyball, all that mattered was that I was out enjoying the sun with people I didn't know. as we played my eyes caught this little boy, probably about 3 years old on his father's skateboard. Not only did this little one clearly not know how to skate he but in addition he was trying to do tricks. In one attempt to flip the skate board I was sure he was going to land on his neck, I confess I was terrified.


My heart was in my hands as I feared he was going to fall and seriously injure himself but all I saw on this kid's face was this innocent, joyful beaming smile. A smile that said, I am having the best time of my life, in short, I am free so you can stand and worry about me but I will have fun. He was just being a kid, living under the rules of a kid and that was all he knew to be. Perhaps in his mind he was sure his father would catch him in a timely fashion should he fall or injure himself, I don't know for sure but I can only assume that such a thought could contribute to making his joy more complete and to a degree we can all feel like that if we wanted to.