Come One, Come All ...

Friends, Family, Animals of all ages, The Schafer Family Circus is HERE !!!

Well, not really, but that’s how it feels sometimes.  When I sit back and watch the 5 kids playing with Ava (mommy) and the 3 puppies, Shayne doing her fire twirling routine at the Stove, and all of us trapped inside a 144 sq. ft. cage, I begin to wonder if its closer to the truth than I know.  Remember visiting the zoo as a kid?  Passing the exhibits admiring the animals behind the bars, did you ever feel a twinge of sadness that the wild animals would spend the rest of their lives trapped in their cages of steel never able to run free again.  As they peered out at you between the bars, their sad faces expressionless, lacking the passion you’d expect to see in a wild creatures eyes, did you ever have pity on them wishing you could set them free.  

At this point I’m tempted to say that sometimes I feel like we are the animals trapped inside our Motor-home cage.  Bound to a fate of endless wanderings, wishing for someone to set us free from our cage and release us to go back to the world we’re used to.  But I wonder if it would be closer to the truth to say that we are free, and that maybe it’s actually you who is trapped inside your cage.  Maybe you’ve been in your cage so long that you don’t recognize the bars any longer.  Everyday, waking up to an existence of bland mediocrity.  Trapped by the constraints of a world that sucks the life out of you and gives you no thanks, bound by the expectations of others.

It’s a bleak picture to paint, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

I am not in a cage, although sometimes the demonic forces of this world would do their best to deceive me into thinking myself so.  I am free.  Free to be who God has called me to be, and free to pursue Him to ends of the world and back.  

And you are not in a cage either, although sometimes it may appear to be so.  There is nothing in this world that can contain you, nothing that can hold you back and suck the life out of you.  There are no bars that can contain you against your will.  

Sometimes I lose hope.  I confess my imperfection, and my sinful lack of faith.  But thanks be to my loving heavenly father who picks me up, dusts me off, and sets my feet once again on the solid rock of freedom.  When I become blinded, He removes the scales off my eyes to see that there are no bars, just truths distorted into lies.  Being a child of God and a follower of Christ sets us free both to live and to die.  We constantly die so that we can live, but sometimes I focus too much on the dying and not enough on the living that death leads us to.  

Thanks for Journeying with us

The Schafer Family