How to Free an Other

A selfish love seldom respects the rights of the beloved to be an autonomous person. Far from respecting the true being of another and granting his personality room to grow and expand in its own original way, this love seeks to keep him in subjection to ourselves.¹

There is a discipline that sets us free. Free from ourselves, free from the sins and lies and fears and bents and habits that enslave us. The goal of that discipline is not behavior modification, or “heart” modification. It’s freedom, empowerment to make own choices. Without discipline, I don’t choose; I merely act. I must be brought under my own control before I can live my life according to my own principles.

Acceptance, Affection, Affirmation

How to free another person (to be grown themselves):

Moves from more restriction to less, not because the child will make good choices, but because they have been equipped to make their own choices and must be allowed to make bad ones.

By freeing yourself. Take the log out of your own eye. By no being dependent upon them for your identity. So that you can be trusted to commit to supporting them tomorrow.
By not seeking to make them dependent upon you for their identity – a common tactic to gain control over the other person “in order to help them”.
You cannot have faith for them. “What do you want Me to do for you.” Jesus doesn’t tell the other person what they want.
Forgive and forget. Let them be someone new today. Not locked in to assumptions about their character.
Allow people to choose today. Don’t require that they live your expectations of them. Don’t assign a label to yesterday’s choice and require compliance with that label. I am a liar. I am a drug addict. I am a transexual.
No social pressure. Always accepted, affirmed and shown affection. No strings attached.
Trust vs trust and verify.

Even affection, affirmation and acceptance are internal states expressed through action. Actions that require interpretation. You can tell someone you love them, but they may not hear it as love. You can tell your kid you love them, but they may not hear it as love. There are limits to communication.

You can help or hinder. You can hurt but not heal. You can offer but not demand. You can’t determine.

Any part of your life that you don’t rule, rules you. 2 Peter 2:19 - they promise them freedom while they themselves are slaves of corruption, since people are enslaved by whatever defeats (makes lower) them.

Grant others the opportunity / freedom to choose. Hope they will choose well. Equip to choose well – maybe only with data and presentation. Prepare yourself for the possibility that they choose poorly. If they are not free – in circumstances, in your expectations, in their understanding of themselves and the world – to choose poorly, then they are not free to choose well. If you arranged to constrain their choices, then you will be judged to the degree to which you stole their freedom, not rewarded for “making” them choose rightly. Because they didn’t choose. You chose for them. Their action was not their free expression of the truth as they understood it, but rather their living in light of whatever lie you used to control them.

Psalm 78. Fathers teach your children, that they would not be rebellious like their fathers. I don’t want my kids, or my guys, to follow me and keep up with me. I want them to get where I am so I can shove them forward and they can go farther. I want the old sayings that are dark to me though I pass them on, to become light to them. Not a return to the garden, but progress to the new earth. New and higher songs. New and richer truth.

4.17. Detached from the work and it’s results. Leaving the results of the job to God alone. To work in God and with Him, to grow in whatever weather He may bring.

9.4 the beginning of this love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. We do not come to know them as they are: we only deform them.

4.18 To renounce the fruit before I begin so that my work as a father becomes a prayer in itself.

When I picked up Cohen from Sunday school, one of the sub volunteers said that he kept wanting to get up and move rather than sit still and listen, and maybe I should talk to him about that. I had been following some trains of thought connected to that leading up to today. That we consider a well behaved child to be one that is still and quiet and attentive to us. When we build a flower bed, it is orderly – every plant spaced appropriately from the next so that each gets the right balance of sun and water and shade, so that each grows without interfering with its neighbor. If you pay someone to trim your trees, they cut away all the small inner branches so that it “looks like a tree”. God’s Shalom is a wild order, loud and teeming with life. Let the waters swarm with swarming things, let the skies be filled with flying things. Not without purpose or design, but also not in straight lines. God scatters seed upon the ground, he does not plant in orderly rows. That tangled wildness of nature means that sometimes a weed overshadows the plant, sometimes a branch grows gnarly. 9 year old boys are built to be wild, loud, running. That’s what healthy looks like. If we’re supposed to become like children in order to enter the Kingdom, I suspect we should do less to try to make the children like us.

Merton 1.8↩︎