9 Years of Freedom—For Freedom He Set Us Free
Today I’m reflecting on a moment that changed my life many years ago now. Nine years, to be specific. There wasn’t one definitive moment, but rather 3 weeks of unraveling, from the end of June to early July in which my life was drastically changed. It started almost the very second I made a leap of faith and opened a book titled “Free on the Inside”, a jail addition Holy Bible donned with a chain link fence, a nod to our being incarcerated and all. God had softened my calloused heart to even be willing to open the book, as I had judged my cell mate for the crosses she had drawn on the wall of her bunk when I had first arrived in the Akron County Jail. But something had changed, and a gentle nudge had propelled me into 1 Timothy, the first book in the Bible that I’d read. I had been arrested at a St. Timothy’s afterall.
After opening those lovely pages, and over the course of three weeks God took me from being a blaspheming, proud, sex and drug driven, and horribly traumatized individual, to a meek, delivered and redeemed daughter that simply wanted to be right with God. Not perfect, but perfected in his eyes. Still with struggles, but now with a covenant with the only God who could ever lead me through them. It was like night and day from when I walked into the jail to when I left, and though I didn’t have words for it at the time, the absoluteness of the “born again” experience had taken place in my life. God had delivered me from my heart of stone and given me a heart of flesh.
A lot can happen in three weeks, I have learned. And more than that, a lot can happen in three days, as it did when Jesus gave his life up on the cross, only to resurrect by the power of the Holy Spirit, having defeated death, hell, the grave, and all the demons that threatened to take me under.
I remember, maybe too clearly, how when I got bailed out and was confronted once again by my drug of choice: crystal meth, my ex-boyfriend and ex-friend used unashamedly in front of me. But I, for the first time in my life, had power over the pangs of desire that had once controlled me. The pangs that had driven me to a rebellious lifestyle which then led to my harsh and complete addiction. As it says in Romans 6:19, “previously you let yourselves be slaves to impurity and lawlessness, which led to even greater lawlessness.” And the second half of that verse: “Now you must give yourselves to be slaves to righteousness which leads to holiness.” Jesus’ power to deliver me from sin was real, and living in my life.
It took three weeks, and lots of “being washed by the Word of God”, for me to be transformed. I remember my hunger for the Word, once I tasted of its truth and relativity to me. For a while I thought the book was magic, my mind still streaked with the residue of new age and Occult vocabulary. But eventually I’d learn that rather it was “living and active”, God’s way to communicate real-time and in story form with his people. The Bible seemed to be reading me more than I it, I remember so clearly.
I also remember sitting in the shared shower space, praying and believing that God was baptizing me then and there in the jail, though I’d make the decision later on to be baptized in front of my church family. Everything had begun to feel so new to me, and in every sense I was feeling how the title of this particular Bible had articulated “free on the inside”. That was me. I was incarcerated, and yet I was free on the inside. Within those cemented in walls and barred doors, and also, within myself.
There have been many highs and lows since those precious three weeks, and I just wanted a chance to meditate on God’s work of saving me, now nine years ago. A lot of people remember their sobriety date, and I do, but more than that I remember the moments in which God saved my soul. I wish I remembered a specific date, but like a finger pointing to a random spot on a map, I’ve decided to point to a random day within those three weeks when belief entered my heart. And the best I can come up with is the Fourth of July. America’s day of freedom, and mine too.
Thanks for looking back on this special time with me, and now, let us look forward. For the plans he has for us are good. They are plans to prosper us and not harm us. To give us a hope and a future. (Jeremiah 29:11)
~Sora
