By Pastor Don Schatz

When You Feel Caged

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Set me free from my prison, that I may praise your name. 
Psalm 42:7 New International Version

Occasionally I can feel like a human gerbil in a cage of plastic tubes.  Going everywhere and nowhere at the same time.  All the time.  Before retirement, I could pin the caging on my job, on other people, even on my family.  In my less-than-charitable-moments, that is.  Now, retired as I am, I do not have that excuse.  In fact, I am forced to realize that I never did.

I suppose there can be almost limitless causes of our ‘caging’.  As I reflect on my own reality, mostly, that ‘caging’ is a result of my own choices, failure to establish good boundaries, the assumptions with which I experience and interpret life (including other people), and the pursuit of goals, values and purposes that in the end are not healthy.  By that, I mean they are not of God.  They do not honor him, but they sure can put me in that gerbil cage; going everywhere and nowhere at the same time.  Mostly, nowhere.

As St. Paul would say, ‘Thanks be to God for Jesus Christ my Savior’.  In his first Servant Song, Isaiah sings with the voice of Yahweh of the Lord’s Messiah: “I…have called you in righteousness; I will take hold of your hand.  I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles, to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness” (Isaiah 42:6-7).

Jesus came to free us from the gerbil cage, maze, prison–however you conceive of it.  The prison of sin, death and the power of the devil are broken open by Christ’s life, empty cross and empty tomb.  We are released.  If I should put myself in a self-made gerbil cage, the Holy Spirit reminds us that Christ freed us from that too.  ‘Don’t live like that’, the Spirit might say.  To Live is Christ.  He gives us Life.  He frees us.  To whom we turn.  In him we walk a glorious path of hope, imitating in his grace the paths of Eden.

Copyright Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Colorado Springs, Colorado