I am a fan of those videos that feature animals being freed. Whether it is dolphins with fish hooks snagged in their mouths, or turtles with soda rings pinching their feet, or bears whose heads are wedged in a can, or a pelican whose mouth is wrapped shut with plastic line, I watch to the very end. Sometimes twice. In most instances, the person who is called to offer help was minding his or her own business, when they chanced upon a creature in distress. In one scene a seal does not trust his rescuers, and tries desperately to bite them, but they persist. There are others in which animals whose entire life has been spent in a cage or at the end of a chain are liberated to the open fields, and their joy moves me to the brink of tears. 

 

The thing about freedom is, there is enough to go around. Unlike such limited commodities as money and time, the expansion of someone else's independence does not diminish my own. On the contrary, it enriches it. 

 

People too suffer from entrapment. In the book I am pondering, Byron Katie helps people to release the constraints that have been shackling them for years. Anger, fear, resentment, revenge keep them stuck in what happened decades ago, eclipsing their ability to see what is wonderful around them now. 

 

There are choices I made in mothering that caused our family pain. But when I cling to those missteps, the regret keeps me as much of a prisoner as the dolphin. My prayer is that I will not snap at the people who try to help me disentangle from those bonds. And that I will respond to the call to help someone else toward their own release. 

 

“God loves each and every human being; and because He cannot do good to them directly, but only indirectly by means of other people, He therefore breathes into people His love.”

True Christian Religion 457