How Can You Look Ahead?

That’s got to be quite a life.

You’re born in a society where you and your people are oppressed as you’re strangers in a strange land. By some miraculous moves, you are finally liberated to pursue a life of your own. Only to discover a few moments later just as you reach a tough point that those who oppressed you are right behind you intent on claiming you back for slavery … the hard way.

That’s got to be tough.

It is tough. It is tough because you haven’t even really got used to this new state of freedom. For your lifetime and the lifetime of your parents and their parents, all you have known is the status quo of being oppressed by the human system. In fact in as much as it is oppression, because it is the in-grained conditioning of generations, you have not dared to truly think there is an alternative. Now moments after that has been realised, it feels like it might have all been just a cruel joke. That force that’s coming after you, is a mighty force indeed – you know it, you’ve been crushed but it and it took a greater hand to liberate you from it, but even now as they get ever closer who is to stop them exerting their will by force now?

That’s got to be very tough.

It is no surprise that in those circumstances, it really requires active trust in one who is far greater than the forces that oppressed for so long. It needs that trust – because it’s clear that He’s shown up before, after all He is the one that took you out in the first place. Knowing what He has done before is crucial to trust Him at this particular point.

He took you out, because He knows you were made to know what it is to be free. He took you out because He knew that to be truly free, you needed to belong to Him. He did not take you out only for you to be drawn back into oppression again.

In those trying circumstances, though, how can you trust? How can you overcome everything in you that reminds you that generations of oppression has been your norm?