Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash
By Steve Matthews, Partner Relations Director
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
The United States just celebrated 250 years as an independent nation. US citizens hold varying degrees of pride and patriotism around this birthday. Some agree with the direction we are headed and some disagree, but we can all agree that “freedom” is a real value to us, can’t we? Or is “freedom” a concept that has relativity these days? Do we all deserve freedom equally? Who is excluded? Why? What are the metrics necessary to deserve the right to be a freedom-loving-American? Who decides?
Perhaps working toward a unified value of freedom is our on-going work, not a destination, and in the meantime, people may find themselves suffering from a sense of exclusion from “The American Dream” du jour.
Freedom is an ambiguous concept. We think we have the freedom to choose a plan and path for our life, until…
… we get the diagnosis.
… we go through a divorce.
… we lose our perfect job.
… the stock market tanks.
What then? What path will we choose next? Will freedom be stable this time?
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” This quote is often attributed to Victor Frankl, but these words were discovered by Steven Covey (an admirer of Frankl) in an undisclosed book and used to describe Frankl’s approach to life. I love this quote because it points to the one place where we can experience true freedom – in our power to choose our response to the inevitable suffering and wrong-doing we encounter over the course of our lives. And if anyone has had experience and practice with choosing responses to the loss of freedom and suffering, it’s Frankl.
In 1942, just nine months after his marriage, Frankl and his family were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Over the next three years his father, mother, brother, and wife died in concentration camps, and Frankl spent three years in four concentration camps including Auschwitz. I can only imagine how many times a day, Frankl had to choose powerful internal responses, responses that kept his spirit alive in the face of unimaginable losses and brutality. And yet within two years of the war’s ending, Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning – his seminal work on the value of living a life with purpose.
While it doesn’t make sense, it can feel like an easier choice to stay in a place of victimhood or status quo lifestyle. It takes a lot of energy to say “YES!” to life. Sometimes we choose to sacrifice true freedom of spirit, because the risk of our “yes” can feel scary or threatening. When bad things happen to us or good things fail to happen, we fail to honor the time gap of choice between “stimulus and response,” and we may choose our more basic critter responses of fight, flight, freeze (or numb), or fawn.
In the lives of faith communities, tragedy can strike too, inviting creative responses. Natural disasters (fire, flood, earthquake) can decimate our buildings, or maybe it’s the sudden death of a much-beloved clergy person that knocks us off balance. Most often, it isn’t the sudden dramatic trauma that stymies a church. It is instead the small, persistent sufferings that can do the most damage to a faith community and inhibit their true freedom. These are the slow-death choices that they may have gotten so used to making – the barely noticeable choices that keep them away from the life intended.
Some common “No’s” for some churches might include: a love for the way the church worships that isn’t inclusive of the community, an unwillingness to get to know the neighbors, unease over the accountability of a unified and refined vision (what if we have to change?), or unresolved conflict in the church. In short, many faith communities fail to claim their freedom and their choices and instead numbly keep the status quo hoping that something will save them or return them to a former glory. This is like death by 1000 cuts.
While these “No’s” to life-giving freedom may be almost unconscious, they are deathly to the spirit-freedom that is dreamed about in the gospels. Freedom to choose faithful responses in the face of oppression and injustice and freedom to choose a bold “Yes” to new behaviors and new ways of being may help faith communities walk the paths of freedom and liberation.
John 8:32 talks about how the truth can set us free. At FaithX we walk with churches on their unique and life-giving paths toward greater truth and freedom. We compassionately hold up a mirror so that churches can see who they really are (the Congregational Vitality Assessment) and how their neighborhoods and communities are changing (MissionMaps for Faith Communities), and we boldly invite creative responses when churches find themselves in the gap with a choice. What are you saying “yes” to these days? What response is being invited that may take you further down paths of freedom?
