“Freedom doesn’t always feel like freedom.  At first it feels like loss; Is He breaking me or is He breaking me free? What you called a breakdown was God breaking you free from what was breaking you down,”  Jay Douglas.  I feel the breakdown of so many of the systems in my life right now.  It took a long time for it to occur to me that things weren’t working because they weren’t meant to work anymore. We spend a lot of time fighting things that God has a different plan for.  The reality is it doesn’t just feel like loss—it IS a loss.  It’s a loss of what we used to know and a loss of the preparation we’ve had.  It’s a loss of knowing what comes next.  But if it wasn’t meant to be for us then we are putting ourselves through nonsense.  There’s a good chance that we picked up something  that wasn’t even ours in the first place.

Life has weight no matter what you do. Do we carry the burdens of others in solving their problems or doing the work for them?  Do we feel their emotion?  Do we feel the weight of our choice to do something that isn’t quite aligned with who we are or what we want?  Do we feel the weight of choosing ourselves over an old pattern? Make no mistake, there is a certain weight to freedom. It’s the weight of responsibility for ourselves. It’s the weight of our own choices.  While the choice is our own, we do not bear it alone.  I’ve asked WHY billions of times in my life.  I never wanted to admit that sometimes that answer was, “because you keep doing this,”.  We are stubborn creatures and we want things to go a certain way but there is no amount of will that can force something that isn’t meant to be to happen.

IF we feel lost in the midst of a change, even a change we asked for, take heart that there’s a good chance the weight of what is being removed or blocked is lighter than the burden of the experience.  The things we love aren’t always good for us, even the things we’ve cultivated and tended to for years.  Loss sucks no matter how long we’ve had something or how long we’ve worked for something.  I’ve recently had to relinquish a project I’ve worked on for 6 years and it felt like pulling teeth.  I had to come to accept that it was no longer for me and that was no longer part of my story.  The very thing that I equated to my livelihood was the thing that had to go and I had to cut all ties with it.  I had to set the boundary that you couldn’t take something from me and come back to me when you needed something.  It was breaking me down and it was removed from my life and I have to do my part to keep it out.  Freedom is a funny thing.  We all seek it but we don’t necessarily know what to do with it.  So consider carefully that we choose our path but we have to trust what comes our way along with what is taken away.