Our Personal Prisons

Free thought on bars.

We all have bars that limit our abundance of life.

My personal prison is transient. Sometimes I feel very confined, other times free as a bird.....But even the bird has bars.

Unfulfilled desires can create the bars behind which we live.

My personal prison is wanting to hear approval from other people. Running in the background is the thought "if I don't hear approval, then 'they' are not approving".

If I do not hear approval, then I find myself likely altering my behavior. This is the structure of the bars. Prisoners have their behavior modified by the bars of their prison. My thinking could really put a burden on other people and/or limits upon myself.

Ideally, I should be able to function with only the approval of God. However, I do believe He has put in us the desire to hear from our fellow humans. He has made us social. Social requires bonding. Bonding requires dependency. Dependency creates limits...Bars.

The bars are a part of human nature.

The question is: "Are the bars detrimental"? Ah, therein lies a very complex answer. Without bars or limits in our interactions with others, we become very self serving and preserving.

Bars can create a bit of safety. They can protect us from dangerous activities, relationships, etc. They can also be a hindrance. They can limit our behavior so severely that we do not function to our full ability.

So how does one tell if our own personal bars are protective or hindrance? The answer is relatively simple. If your bars are keeping you from doing God's work then they are a hindrance.

So what is God's work?
Again the answer is simple: Glorifying God by loving our neighbors by strong>DOINGto others as we would have them do to us.

All the rest pales before this command.

People make life so complicated when in reality if we keep our focus on the right mark, it is realitively simple. Super Bowl weekend is upon our country. The players work together for a single purpose. They take hits for each other, they block the "enemy" all with the goal in mind.

The bars, the blocks, the hits, the hurts, the obstructed paths all fall into perpective as part of the inevitable life on earth. God's team functions best with gloryfying God as the goal.