Freedom

I have read Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, more times than I can count. I read it again recently, right after I got married, because I was going back to the beach and wanted to read something I knew. There were, once again, many wise words to contemplate, but one phrase caught me in a way it hadn’t before: “a pattern of freedom.” Anne writes that “an island, curiously enough, gives a limitless feeling,” one of both full constraint and full freedom. The book reminded me of a trip I took in 2021 — a spontaneous decision to go to the Virgin Islands with my two good friends. I had never craved a trip to the Caribbean up to that point. It seemed too perfect in pictures, to the point where the perfectly blue water seemed to be a cliche. But I found on this trip that islands are, quite often, worth the hype. We stayed in a house high up on a hill, with a balcony overlooking the whole island and out onto the ocean, and the memory still brings me a feeling of settledness and joy.

The house we stayed in on that trip wasn’t modern or even beautiful, and the mosquitos were ready to feast as we slept each night. We drank instant coffee each morning on the balcony as we read and journaled and slowly woke up. We ate local food and kayaked through mangrove forests. We went out an a small, cramped boat and then jumped off it’s back to snorkel with sea turtles — one of the loveliest things I’ve ever done. We spent two days at Magens Bay, the most stunning, clear-blue-water beach I have ever seen, as we drank painkillers and read our books and soaked in water completely free of seaweed. Every beach we’ve been to since has been compared to Magens Bay, and none have come close. We ate the best jerk chicken of our lives on that trip, and time seemed to stop completely. We arrived on a Monday night and left on a Saturday morning — only four full days to enjoy, as I was pastoring at the time and couldn’t miss a Sunday service — but it felt like a lifetime. 

This, I found, is the gift of an island. In a space completely cut off from other land, a place where there are extreme limits to your physical life, somehow this is where we find pure freedom. Island life makes the world small again, the way it felt when we were children. There is less possibility, less to do, less to dream about, and so we become more present in the space that we inhabit. It is becoming childlike: children, too, seem to live in full freedom, and yet they are the least free. They have no money of their own, no choices to make about who to be or what to buy or where to go. They are given their schedule for the day, and they live within it, completely uninhibited. Freedom, it seems, comes to us when there are pure, undefiled boundaries on our time and space. Only when we are wrapped up in a safe place, even one that seemingly cuts off our freedoms, do we experience true presence. 

This is how I felt during 2021, and I’m not sure I knew it until it was nearly over.  I had been pastoring for three years, and was starting to understand the lay of the land. I was four years into studying for my M.Div and enjoying my classes. I lived in a lovely home with a good friend, and we spent a few hours together each Sunday praying for one another. I met new friends that February who had just moved from another country, and while I worked myself up that year trying to learn about immigration and food scarcity and evictions, I also built a wonderful friendship with that couple that still lives to this day. I took time to visit my grandma in Indiana, went on my adventure to the Virgin Islands with the girls, and learned to settle into a place, a vocation, and a life that I swore I would never be able to settle into. Freedom was not the word I would have used to describe it all at the time, but looking back, that’s exactly what it was. 

I am reminded of this feeling again, in the season I’ve landed in right now. I am now a homeowner, married with two bonus children. I am at the beginning of a new job back at the church after three years away learning how to best serve refugees. At points, I have been anxious for more spacious land; more of what the world calls freedom. But at one point a few months ago, right before I got married, I woke up and felt like the Lord whispered in my ear: “You are in the cleft of the rock.” In Exodus 33, Moses says that he will not go to the Promised Land without the presence of God. He asks God to teach him God’s ways, and then he asks God to show him God’s glory. And God does — but first he tells Moses that “when my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.” It is in this presence of God’s glory that we are most free, and most ourselves. It may feel like an island; it may even feel like a dark, hidden place. But when we look back, we begin to realize: it was in that small, contained space that God showed us his glory; that he revealed our true freedom.