Spiritual Freedom

I always find it funny when books say they are “life changing”. I have read many books that have made this claim, and while they were moving or thought provoking in some way, they did not completely alter my thought process as they claimed they would.  To my surprise, Spiritual Freedom by Father Dave Pivonka truly lived up to the hype of being “life changing”. While I read this book, I felt like it was written just for me and no one else. While it made be silly, but while I read, I kept imagining God whispering into Father Dave’s ear saying, “hey can you write about feeling alone, Madi needs to hear about that right now.” In the end, Spiritual Freedom tugged at my heart strings at all the right times and really prompted me to look my idea of freedom in general as well as teaching me about freedom with my relationships and my faith. When I started this book, I was in a really hard place with all of my relationships, including my relationship with God, and by the end of this book I felt like my heart and mind had just reset them. I truly had a new mind set on my life and its problems and I feel like this book opened up the door to a fresh start for me in my life.

               Prior to reading this book, I believed freedom to be escaping the protective bubble that parents and school had secured you in. I thought that I could only escape that bubble by running away to college away from the life that had once made me feel like I was confined to a jail cell. My entire high school career I had looked up to my brother because I felt like he had more freedom than I and I was so anxious for college so that  I too could finally be free to make up my own mind and not have to answer to anybody in regards to my decisions. I blamed all of my suffering on those around me. Frankly, I never thought it was my fault, but in reality, nothing is ever a one way street and It was hard for me to face the fact that  I had contributed to the cause of my problems that I am constantly getting mad at God or my family for.

 In chapter six of Spiritual Freedom, Freedom’s Gateway, Father Dave said something that made me feel like he was speaking directly to me. “It’s hard to except the fact that life is hard. We want it to be easy so that we don’t have to get hurt. The problem is that in our desire for life to be easy, we spend a lot of time running from or ignoring the reality that is life.”  I realized that I had never done anything to actually fix the things in my life that were putting so much strain on my heart and relationships. I spent so much time whining about my problems and I should have spent that time seriously looking at the situation and trying to fix it. God isn’t a magician. He isn’t going to wave his magic wand and make all of my dreams come true just because I came to him, begging him to take away my pain. What would be beneficial in that? Absolutely nothing. Yes, God will always be at my side and not matter what, he has a solution to my problems and that is heaven. Heaven is something that we have to strive for. Would we really be working towards pure happiness if we could have it here on earth? No we wouldn’t be. It took a lot for me to accept this, but I realized that I want to be challenged. I want to be tested. I want to go to heaven and give God a big hug because I did it and I endured through everything with him at my side. I realized that I won’t get to do that if I don’t go out into the world to learn the lessons that God has in store for me.

While I was reading, there was one thought that I had that was quite shocking to me. When Father Dave said, “In order to grow deeper in freedom, you must decide to be free. It may seem obvious that if someone is bound then they would want to be free, but that is not always the case. Sometimes bondage seems more preferable because it is familiar.” I read this line about twenty times. I guess I had never considered the idea that maybe I was keeping myself from being free. I had numbed myself to the pain and I clung to the daily arguing and craziness just because it was the only thing that I knew.  Sadly, looking back on my life I realize that this was how I acted. In a weird way, I felt like the fighting with my Mom was just a part of everyday life and without it, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. This was a hard revelation to come to because I realized in part that I had been clinging to the things that were making me unhappy. Breaking this ideal opened up many doors for me with my relationships with my family and it is often crazy to think that the answer was always right in front of you, you just had to grab it.

I had never asked God to set me free, I had only ever complained to him about what was occurring. After reading this book and following the prayer guides at the end of each chapter, I decided that freedom is hard, but it is something that I want to work towards. One of my all-time favorite quotes is “Freedom is not Free”. This was peculiar at first, but in the end it makes so much sense. No one is just going to hand you freedom. It is something you have to earn for yourself. Life isn’t perfect, nor should I be, but the freedom to experience love and act in God’s truth is what carries you through the hard times.