Quote of the Day
Freedom is not the right to live as we please, but the right to find how we ought to live in order to fulfill our potential.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
We must, at any cost, find our personal freedom before we can find our individual purpose. Each of us has a unique bondage experience that must be defeated lest we waste a lifetime fruitlessly struggling to find our greatest contribution.
Our bondages include anything that cause us to choose a lesser path than our unique truth demands. Sometimes they look like respectable careers, other times like accepted dogma or even right speech.
Mostly, however, we choose to lock our bondages deep in our souls, fearing their release would force changes in us that we are not willing to face.
These hidden - but never dormant - dark realities always require more of us than we are willing to give, and they are almost always only released by personal crises.
Freedom by an unsolicited crisis is painful and often humiliating, but any who have discovered their individual truth via crisis understands the truth of this musing. As Brennan Manning says, Grace alone allows us to understand that "the worst thing that ever happened to us is the best thing that ever happened to us".
I live and have the temerity to speak openly of these things because of grace. JG
