My friend told me once she thought that birds were the saddest sort of pets to have. She didn’t understand a caged bird. The birds were meant to fly. I agreed and have always thought the same since.
My grandmother was very fond of birds. When the birds came to her window, she named them. She would tell me how one might keep coming to visit her. She had pleasant little conversations with them, and those birds had become friends to a lonely lady.
I decidedly took an interest in birds when she died. I always tell my friends that a bird feeder makes the best pet. Not only do you get to enjoy the company of many birds, you don’t have to clean up after them, take them out for a walk or bother to feed them when away. It’s brilliant. And so I enjoy my “pets” from the comfort of my window and the occasional brave squirrel that makes it up to my third floor bird feeder.
I’ve never named any of the birds that have come to visit me like my grandmother, probably because they are not mine. They are free.
Hope, Joy, Youth, Waste, Ruin, Despair, Madness, and Death.
These are the names of the pet birds in Charles Dickens’s novel, Bleak House. The owner of the caged birds hopes to free them from their cages once the characters of the novel they represent are free indeed.
These are the captives of misguided trust. And life in captivity is inevitably a death sentence.
So why would we put our hope in a cage?
Confine our joy?
Lock up our despair?
Or hold captive our madness?
You will exhaust your present resources if you seek to find your hope in your own hope. Sadly, it will ultimately fail you.
Where do you find your joy? It will never suffice to find joy in the temporal things of this world. You have chosen to “cage” joy. And that too is a death sentence.
Consider your own despair. What good will your despair do if you cage it, keep it, wait for it to somehow free itself?
When you’ve caged your own madness, tell me, how will you find a key then?
Life puts us into scenarios where we find we want to protect our selfish tendencies and confine our deepest disappointments. We put them all into cages. And then we name them.
Hope, Youth, Waste, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death
If you please, I believe there is a way to live in freedom from the cages we have found ourselves in.
I know the One who holds the keys to all these “cages”. I know an eternal Hope and a complete Joy. I know a Rescuer for those defeated by Despair, and there is a Peacemaker for the rage of one’s Madness.
But, He requires a trade for this ultimate freedom: a cage for a Cross
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. Galatians 2:20
All these “cages” I speak of remind me of my own “cages” I’ve fashioned.
I’ve been asked many times what drew me to go embarking on this upcoming journey. I fear my motives when written down seem somewhat selfish. There are so many reasons to go on the trip: adventure, travel, to meet people’s physical needs, to help struggling communities, to encourage established missionaries and to share the gospel. I knew all this would be great reason enough to go. However, none of them are what truly drew me.
There are many things we confine our trust in: family, money, relationship, the church, our health. I have felt a great calling from God in my heart to leave all and follow Him. To stop following after my family, money, relationships, churches, health. To chase after nothing other than Him. And in a sense “uncage” my perspective of God. I think we easily set limits or boundaries on how we view Him. We are swayed by media, by our friends, by family, by our assumptions or by the mistakes of imperfect man. And these all offer us a perspective of how to define God and determine what He is capable of doing or not doing in our lives. I want to free myself of all that nonsense and trust in nothing, but Him.
This experience where I am choosing to leave my family for one year, leave the security of my job, leave my place I rest my head, leave the hope of a relationship and my own family, and possibly leave even my health is the true reason that drew me to go on the trip of a lifetime. I’d like to “uncage” my idea that all the things I hold so dear here on earth are sustaining me.
Only He sustains me, and only He can set me free.
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. Galatians 5:1
So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. John 8:36
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever! Amen. Eph 3:20-21
