I was adopted when I was four. It took very little time for me to understand the routine. There was a specific place to eat, in a specific chair. Chores were to be done at specific times in specific manner. The time I was to get up and the time I was to go to bed were hard and fast rules. Deviation was only allowed in extenuating circumstances, deemed necessary by my mother. I had a closet full of clothes, picked out by my mother, laid out by my mother on my bed every morning as to which actual shirt and pants I was to wear.
Most of these things were okay when I was really young. I didn’t know to question them. But as I grew, and tried to exercise my will, I learned quickly that resistance or “rebellion” came at a high cost. My hair “style” was selected by my mother. Not only did I not select my own clothes, I didn’t select which ones I could wear daily, and I couldn’t even select how I wore them. The shirt must be tucked in, and a belt must be around the waist.
I couldn’t talk on the phone unless my mother was on the extension listening, and I couldn’t talk for more than two or three minutes. I was never allowed to have friends over. Laughter was a reason for my mom’s wrath. I accidentally grabbed the mustard bottle at the dinner table instead of my glass of tea. An uncalculated giggle came out of my nine year old mouth. To teach me this was no laughing matter, my mother grabbed a spoon and filled it with mustard (which I hate), and made me swallow it. No, you did not laugh at the dinner table, nor did you express an opinion.
As the stifling environment began to suffocate me, I sought for some space, a reprieve… I began to journal as a place to express my thoughts that I dared not utter. Two journal entries into my first journal, I came home from school and my mother was standing waiting for me, one hand on the hip, other hand holding my journal, infuriated. She screamed at me, demanding to know why I wrote in my journal what I wrote. (It was a recount of recent events and my thoughts on them.) The punishment was severe, and I was instructed from now on I could only write what the weather was like in my journal.
In “rebellion” of my personal thoughts being read, I tore out the pages of my journal and shredded them. The next day I was greeted on my return from school with the same angry mom, hand on the hip and journal in hand demanding to know what I did with my journal entries that were torn out. The punishment for that was severe as well. I never journaled in that house again, by my choice.
In my misery and desperation, I began running away when I was fifteen. To teach me a lesson one time, my mom instructed the small town cop to not bring me home but instead to take me to jail. I was driven to another town and taken to a holding room. Eventually a social worker came in and talked to me. By this time I trusted no one, especially an adult in authority. That’s another long story, but I’ll skip to the part that they took me home and I was rewarded with stiff punishment for embarrassing my parents.
The next time I ran away that the cops had to get me, it was the police chief. His kindness I will never forget, as he sought desperately for a way to help me. He eventually had to take me back home, in which my parents loaded me into the car and took me to the city where they admitted me into the psych ward at a hospital. I would spend the next six weeks in a mental hospital. It would be six of the hardest weeks of my life – and I’d already had some pretty hard things happen in my life.
After this I was in utter fear and broken. I walked on eggshells trying to maintain the peace by dotting my i’s and crossing my t’s, so as to not incur more wrath. I read my Bible at night by the night light after everyone was asleep. The first scripture I learned leapt off the page at me and caught me precisely where I was: John 8:32, “you will know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” That’s when I realized it was freedom I was desperate for.
The summer before my senior year was the hardest it had been. I called it (in my head) the Cold War. No one spoke to me unless absolutely necessary and I spoke to no one. Another long story led to events that found me locked out of my home. I was sixteen, and had only the clothes on my back. I had no job, no driver’s license, no car, no home and now no family. I landed on a couch at my boyfriend’s house, trying desperately to get back home. My parents had one condition for my return: go back to the mental hospital.
I’ll never forget my great desperation for home and family, however dysfunctional or abusive it was. I wanted nothing more than to be home before school began in the fall. I was living in borrowed clothes, bumming rides to a job I had lied about and forged my parent’s signature to get, and exhausted in every sense of the word. I longed for stability and security. As I met my parents at a neutral location to discuss my return, and they laid out the condition for my return, there was something that rose up in me from the depths of me. I didn’t understand it then, but I followed its leading as I said, “I can’t go back to the mental hospital.” And my mother walked out the door while my dad said, “Good luck on the streets kid.”
I never went back home, and the rest of the story is long and hard and not the point of my writing right now. What I came to recognize was that my soul craved freedom even more than it needed security.
I would spend the rest of my life seeking truth to obtain freedom.
President Trump stated in his State of the Union address Tuesday, “America was founded on liberty and independence – not government coercion, domination and control. We are born free, and we will stay free.”
Every American citizen born today is indeed in theory born free. But before the declaration of independence in 1776, Americans were under the stifling, controlling rule of a tyrant king with laws and taxations so cumbersome that its people groaned under the weight. These people tried for decades to live within the restrictions of this rule, not wanting the mess of “rebellion”. I get this.
What is it they say, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know? Familiar, even if dysfunctional, is comfortable. You can calculate it. The unfamiliar comes with a host of issues you don’t know about, and you’re not sure you want to pay the price for. It is human nature is to stay in the place of comfort and security … even if it’s an unhealthy place.
… Until the human spirit longs for freedom. There is nothing like freedom. If I succeed or if I fail is secondary to the ability to try. To put my fate in the hands of someone else is surely the mark of laziness, and those who do cannot complain of the consequences they encounter.
The tenets of socialism run contrary to the purpose of America’s foundation. To embrace socialism and socialistic principles is to rebel against liberty. You quite simply cannot have both. There is an ignorant and deceitful spirit running through America’s academia, wooing America’s young generation, and its design is to enslave these people and alter our nation. The deceit is they will not realize their enslavement until their children and grandchildren are crying out for freedom.
If ever the citizens of our great nation need to unite for the purpose of liberty, this is that time. Our President has called upon the citizens of America to unite for the good of America and Americans. A people dependent upon a government that has proven corrupt, will reap the results of that corruption. Justice will fail. True liberty will be exchanged for favors, and favors generally go to the highest bidder.
Eighteen years ago, the Lord asked me who kept my body safe? I had been ticketed and chided by law enforcement for not having the proper child restraint in my car. (It was an extenuating circumstance of an extra passenger for a seven minute ride.) The law enforcement suggested that it was he who saved my child’s life (even though not endangered). Afterwards the Lord asked me who really keeps me? This was a matter of my belief system. Is my faith in laws and institutions, or is my faith in my Creator? I pondered that and responded to the Lord that I trusted Him to keep me. He then asked me if He can keep me safe even without a seat restraint? Of course He can.
I have not worn a seat belt for eighteen years. Not because I am in rebellion to the (unconstitutional) law, but because I am in obedience to a higher power. I will pay the fines for breaking the law, or I will fight to change the law, but either way, I have exercised my freedom to trust my God for my safety. Right now in America, I still have that liberty.
In America today we have literally hundreds of laws that are in violation of the Constitution and the foundations of America given by our Founding Fathers. If we have such compromise in a system fighting socialism, can you imagine what it will be like within a socialistic system? There is much in America that needs changed. Our justice system is corrupt and broken. Our representatives no longer represent the people who voted for them, but the people who pay them for favors. There’s a lot of work to do in America to right its wrongs. But it will be far easier under a President who addresses this than the Congress that is sabotaging it.
Rebellion is never the preferred course. Reason, diplomacy, corrective measures are. But our Declaration of Independence tells us that, “…whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…” May America never see that day again, but may Americans preserve the liberties and the government that upholds our Constitution for such.
President Trump endorsed this as he concluded,
“We must reject the politics of revenge, resistance and retribution – and embrace the boundless potential of cooperation, compromise and the common good. We must choose between greatness or gridlock, results or resistance, vision or vengeance, incredible progress or pointless destruction. Tonight, I ask you to choose greatness.”
© 2019 Ms. Smallback – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Ms. Smallback: M.Smallback@cox.net
