Price of freedom

My Grandad grew up on a tobacco farm in western Kentucky. He spent his boyhood days planting, harvesting, drying and smoking tobacco. Shortly after he and my Granny were married, he shipped off to Germany to fight for the cause of freedom. The story handed down is a cease-fire was declared while crossing the Atlantic en route to the combat zone, changing his and his unit's mission from combat to peacekeeper. Estimates are that 56.4 million men and women, civilian and military, died during the second great war (guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/highest-death-toll-from-wars/?fb_comment_id=837406259615349_1637898349566132). The savagery of the Holocaust, the blood-stained beaches of Normandy, and the haunting remains buried at Pearl Harbor are stark reminders freedom is never free.

Freedom, whether political, societal or personal, and intrinsic, is never without costs nor boundaries. Freedom that haphazardly casts of all restraints creates a new form of enslavement. If nothing is bad, then nothing is good, and all we are is good-for-nothing.

Proverbs 29:18 though reads, "Where there is no prophetic vision," an absence of God's revelation, "the people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law." Without a sense of a transcendent value, an awareness that you matter more than the sum of your parts, the loss of sleep has no more value than the loss of life in freedoms cause.

Yet God, who created us in His image, invites us to know real freedom by yielding our lives to Him in faith. To know true and lasting joy by building our lives on the foundation of his word. To say with conviction, "These restraints I am placing on myself, based on what God has said, offer me more freedom than any absence of them ever could."

My Grandad died in November 2019, Granny the following May. Very few days go by where I do not think of them. I think of their poor beginnings together and their small, one-bedroom, second-floor apartment in which two kids with nothing but faith, a yellow stove and some hand-me-down furniture took on the world. I think of all the blessings I have in my life because, not only did they do their part for freedom's cause, but because they committed their lives to serve the Lord and loving each other.

Freedom with boundaries costs. But freedom without constraint consumes everything.