The Freedom that Surrender Brings

 “If we are to receive benefit from our captivity we must accept the situation and turn it to the best possible account. Fretting over that from which we have been removed or which has been taken away from us, will not make things better, but it will prevent us from improving those which remain. The bond is only tightened by our stretching it to the uttermost.



The impatient horse which will not quietly endure his halter only strangles himself in his stall. The high-mettled animal that is restive in the yoke only galls his shoulders; and everyone will understand the difference between the restless starling of which Sterne has written, breaking its wings against the bars of the cage, and crying, “I can't get out, I can't get out,” and the docile canary that sits upon its perch and sings as if it would out rival the lark soaring to heaven's gate.


No calamity can be to us an unmixed evil if we carry it in direct and fervent prayer to God, for even as one in taking shelter from the rain beneath a tree may find on its branches fruit which he looked not for, so we in fleeing for refuge beneath the shadow of God's wing, will always find more in God than we had seen or known before.


It is thus through our trials an affliction that God gives us fresh revelations of Himself; an the Jabbok ford leads to Peniel, where, as the result of our wrestling, we “see God face-to-face,” and our lives are preserved. Take this to thyself, O captive, and He will give thee “songs in the night,” and turn for thee “the shadow of death into the morning.” ~William Taylor


“Submission to the divine will is the softest pillow on which to recline.”


You are never to complain of your birth, your training, your employments, your hardships; never to fancy that you could be something if only you had a different lot and sphere assigned you. God understands His own plan, and He knows what you want a great deal better than you do. The very things that you most deprecate, as fatal limitations or obstructions, are probably what you most want. What you call hindrances, obstacles, discouragements, are probably God's opportunities. Bring down your soul, or rather, bring it up to receive God's will and do His work, in your lot, in your sphere, under your cloud of obscurity, against your temptations, and then you shall find that your condition is never opposed to your good, but really consistent with it.~Horace Bushnell


Freedom in Prison by Madame Guyon

A little bird I am,
Shut from the fields of air;
And in my cage I sit and sing
To Him who place me there;
Well pleased a prisoner to be,
Because, my God, it pleases Thee.


My cage confines me round;
Abroad I cannot fly;
But though my wing is closely bound,
My heart’s at liberty.
My prison walls can not control
The flight, the freedom of my soul.


Oh, it is good to soar
These bolts and bars above,
To Him whose purpose I adore,
Whose providence I love:
And in thy mighty will to find
The joy, the freedom of the mind.


Pictured above:  Marcus  (Grandson) enjoying a summer day.  I always "picture" freedom when I see a child.  A child like trust in our Father who only desires our best.