Liberation

Liberty is, for many, extremely illusive.  The community in many countries and cultures has heard words of freedom, even witnessed liberty through images.  Yet the experience of liberty and freedom is still just a promise.  Life is shaped by traditional customs and old mantras.  Control comes through long establish lines of power and communication. 
 
I’m not sure life, liberty, and freedom is different when one comes home.  Freedom exists for the select in many western countries and emerging economic powers.  Liberty is tantalizingly close to those willing to learn, work, and change.  Yet there are powers which bind us.  Often for the select it is the result of their decisions and actions.  For those on the edges of the new world the select often try to exclude, marginalize, and even ignore.  For those in communities of liberty and freedom, are we reaching out to family members strapped by the bonds of ignorance, poverty, or selfishness?
 
I read of hope and wonder which side I am on.  I know compassion is going to win!  I understand mercy is more powerful than judgment.  I trust love to win out over the alternative.  In time “they'll be rounded up like prisoners in a jail, corralled and locked up in a jail, and then sentenced and put to hard labor.  Shamefaced moon will cower, humiliated, red-faced sun will skulk, disgraced, because God-of-the-Angel-Armies will take over, ruling from Mount Zion and Jerusalem, splendid and glorious before all his leaders.”  (Isaiah 24.22, 23)  Yet in the interim, which side am I on?
 
In America they celebrate, like others, a moment of liberty.  It was born in a time filled with promise and hope.  God gives us the gift of liberty and freedom; they can be found at the beginning of each day, in the quietness of the night, and even in the chaos of the moment.  You and I hold these within our hearts and souls.  The question then and now lies buried in the fact that we are liberated; in this moment will we be instruments of liberty, freedom, and hope?