Blind Faith, Part 2
Category: Faith...
Posted Tuesday, September 05, 2006 at 08:49 AM [GMT-6]

Part 1 may be found here

When I'm leading Abbye on her walks through the neighborhood, we'll often be assaulted by the sounds of dogs barking and growling, concealed and contained within backyard fences. Sometimes the dogs have knotholes or missing slats to peer through, but more often they're reacting to scent and sound. And I'm occasionally saddened to contemplate that Abbye can no longer enjoy what I'm guessing is a pleasurable canine activity.

However, it also occurs to me that in a very important and real way, Abbye actually has more freedom than any of those other dogs. She may be following blindly, tethered to a guide, but she's moving forward, unlike those others who are confined to open but very small spaces. Their reality essentially stops at the fence line.

The basic human condition is similar. We're all imprisoned to some extent by our bad decisions and the pride that leads to a refusal to accept guidance from our Maker. Those things form a wall, a barrier, that prevents us from perceiving and experiencing the freedom that God wants us to have.

The spiritual "leash" that connects us to God is, in fact, our ticket to an amazing and comfortable degree of freedom. The fact that some who read this will deem it completely counterintuitive and illogical actually reinforces its truth.

I once read a post on an otherwise long-forgotten blog about the excitement the writer was feeling over an upcoming appointment with his newly discovered "soulmate." The romantic event was a joint exam to confirm that neither of them had STDs; if the tests proved negative, they could remove another barrier, so to speak, in their relationship. This is simply one example of the way we've perverted the definition of freedom, preferring to make it up as we go along rather than admit that God may have actually known what He was doing when He created that "leash" of laws that serve to shield us from our own self-destructive tendencies.

The moral of the story? I'm not wise enough to give a final answer, but one thing that occurs to me is that our definition of freedom is infinitely more limiting than God's.