I used to think freedom meant nobody could tell me what to do. No rules. No authority. No one telling me what was right or wrong. I wanted to belong entirely to myself.
I thought that was freedom.
It took me a very long time to discover that I had mistaken the absence of boundaries for liberty.
I had spent years being ruled by things I didn’t recognize as rulers. My appetites. My fears. My wounds. My impulses. Other people’s opinions. My desperate need to escape whatever I didn’t know how to sit with.
I thought I was becoming myself.
Really, I was being dragged around by whatever had the strongest grip on me.
Then God began teaching me something I wish I had understood much earlier.
Freedom isn’t the ability to do whatever you want.
Freedom is becoming the kind of person who can choose what is good.
It is learning that you don’t have to obey every feeling. That you can endure discomfort. That you can say no. That you can discipline yourself. That you can give something up because you love something more. That surrender to God does not make you smaller. It gives you somewhere solid to stand.
And now I have children.
Which creates a peculiar kind of ache.
Because I am trying to raise people into something I didn’t know how to become until much later in life.
I am trying to teach them self-control before they have spent years learning what happens when you don’t have it. I am trying to teach them responsibility before irresponsibility costs them anything. I am trying to teach them that their feelings are real but they are not their masters. That freedom and consequence are old friends. That discipline is not the enemy of joy. That character is built in thousands of tiny, unremarkable decisions.
And sometimes I look at them and realize how unfairly difficult this is.
How do you teach someone a road you only found after getting spectacularly lost?
How do you give your children wisdom that you had to acquire through years of mistakes?
How do you explain the cliff when you once spent years standing on its edge?
I can’t give them my hindsight.
I can’t hand them the lessons without the scars that taught me.
And I can’t protect them from every foolish decision. Nor should I.
But I can build a home where truth is normal. Where work is expected. Where apologies happen. Where responsibility belongs to the person who caused the problem. Where God isn’t a decorative Sunday accessory but the center of everything. Where they learn that being told “no” is not the same thing as being unloved. Where they discover early that freedom isn’t getting everything you want.
It is becoming someone who can be trusted with what you have been given.
Maybe that is one of the strangest parts of motherhood.
You spend your life becoming someone you wish you had been sooner, and then you look at these little people and desperately hope they won’t have to wait as long.
I don’t need my children to become perfect.
I don’t need them to avoid every mistake I made.
I don’t even need them to become versions of me.
I want them to become whole.
To know who they are.
To know Whose they are.
To have enough courage to stand alone and enough humility to kneel.
And if I can help them discover that at twenty instead of forty, at fifteen instead of thirty, perhaps some of the road I had to walk was not wasted after all.
Maybe this is part of redemption too.
Not erasing the past.
But taking everything you finally learned there and building a better road for the people coming behind you.
I spent years trying to become free.
Now I am trying to raise children who might know what freedom actually is before they have to spend half their lives looking for it.
B🤍
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