FREEDOM IS A GIFT

This week is the Jewish holiday of Passover. It's a festival that's been celebrated for thousands of years and every year we read the same story of how Moses took the Israelites from oppression into freedom. It's a powerful story of how one man can change the lives of many and continue to influence people for hundreds of generations.

Whether we believe the story is true or not is irrelevant. The powerful metaphor contained within it has been a beacon for many oppressed peoples throughout the world. Martin Luther King, Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and many, many others, took the story of the Exodus and made it their own.

Many of you already know the story of Moses and how he parted the waters to lead his people across the Red Sea. Now I don't know about you, but I've been to the Red Sea, and it's pretty big. It was a long walk across with the chariots of the Pharaoh bearing down on them. But the idea that we can overcome the limitations of what other people place upon us is a powerful idea.

Enslavement was and is the darkest part of humanity. The idea that we can control the destiny of others with our will, with our beliefs and with our iron fist, is anathema to how we want to be as humans. To deny the lives of others to further our own power or control is a bitter pill no one should be forced to swallow.

But it's not only the physical act of holding someone in bondage or keeping them oppressed that stands out for me in the Passover story. It is the way we hold this metaphor for how we live our own lives.

We are all in bondage to something.

In my own life, I grew up in a family where chaos ruled. My father was a serious alcoholic who physically abused both his wife and his children for many years. Now, I could have gone one of two ways. I could have been kicked into the gutter of life and reverted to alcohol myself, or I could take the higher road and find my salvation in other things. Well, it was a bit of both in reality.

I loved drugs and alcohol from an early age. I was thirteen when I started drinking and I was fifteen when I got hooked on amphetamines. My self-esteem was lower than a gnat, but that didn't seem to stop me. As you can see, I'm here now talking about it. But the long road out of bondage to this place I stand in today, being a Fearless Fifty, took me into some very dark and scary places. It is not a road I would recommend anyone going down, but for me there was no option. It was that or perish.

Along the way, people close to me were hurt but I couldn't help myself, and as I continued to struggle with drug and alcohol dependency it would eventually push me into Alcoholics Anonymous. I am not a Bill W story, although I was in AA for five years. During that time I was also undergoing some very intensive therapy and I confronted a lot of the demons, including being a victim of sexual abuse, which I had locked away.

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