Free To Be Me

I have a friend who was telling me about a conversation he had with his life coach and the excitement that he felt when told that he could be "free to be me". This was good advice for my friend, who is very much bound and gagged by many layers of protective behaviors.

So, for him the advice to be "free to be me" was allowing space to be imperfect. Creating safety to take of the mask and reveal the broken, yearning person underneath. Giving permission to like the things he does, regardless of whether those things fit in with what he is supposed to like. His life coach was speaking of healthy relational differentiation and developing the ability to love himself.

While the jury is still out on what my friend will do with this advice, being "free to be me" presents and interesting fork in the road. One path of the fork has the appearance of freedom, but it's an impostor. Too often I've seen people take the "free to be me" message to mean that it is OK to live in their brokenness and adopt that as their identity. So "free to be me" looks like free to lash out in anger, free to lust, free to gossip, or free to [insert sin here]. Freedom becomes a bulldozer. The need to live in this 'freedom' becomes a relational tyrant.

Remember the old Julia Roberts movie Sleeping with the Enemy? For those of you not in your early 40's, it is about a woman who lives with an extremely obsessive compulsive spouse. He wants the labels on cans facing the same way, the towels have to be perfectly even, she must look perfect and act happy. The consequence for failure or imperfection was physical violence - the lesson needs to be learned so it won't happen again. While the husband was just living "free to be me", he was a slave to his compulsive desire for perfection. So was his wife. She was devastated and her soul damaged by his freedom.

'Freedom', taken this way, holds both myself and those around me in bondage. That is the danger zone. True freedom should not infringe on the freedom of others. In fact, our freedom should allow others to flourish, blossom, and grow in their own. That is the other path on the fork.

This other path is the freedom to present our brokenness to the Father and allow Christ to be strong through us. Free to be dependent. Free to be weak. Free to allow Christ to bear our burdens for us. Freedom to not cover our shame with self effort, idols, and other's approval, but allow it to be covered in Christ. That is freedom that is life giving and gives us the freedom to love others. That is the freedom for which Christ set us free.