A pastoral Christian letter offering encouragement for moving forward in faith Guilt can weigh heavy on the heart, but God’s mercy is greater than your mistakes. If you’re struggling with guilt, your mental health or feeling isolated and alone, the following Booster has been written especially for you and offers biblical wisdom, grace, and encouragement […]
Imagine yourself walking through a dark dense wood – you cannot see a path, the way ahead is blocked by branches, the light is poor and you start wondering if you’re going ‘to make it’. This experience of feeling boxed in is claustrophobic, debilitating and can be frightening. People find themselves trapped to the left and the right by many things – guilt, sorrow, shame, besetting sin, lack of self-worth, pain and circumstances. This is neither how the child of God should live now nor will it be in the future for our inheritance is freedom from the land of shadows. To discover the way into the spacious places with God is true breakthrough.
The Channel Island of Jersey has a public area known as Liberation Square where freedom from military occupation is celebrated annually on the 9th of May. There are still many signs on the island of that painful occupation during World War Two – discarded bunkers, gun towers and casemates ravage the otherwise beautiful coastland as reminders of Hitler’s mighty ‘Atlantic Wall’. A day after VE Day, German forces surrendered unconditionally and Jersey found precious freedom again. It is not just in war that people lose freedom and live under the tyranny of occupation – many are living like this today but this is not the destiny for a child of God. Are you on the freedom path?
Slavery seems to belong to a past era of slave ships, shackles and castle dungeons but sadly this is a delusion. William Wilberforce, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln are names of those passionate to abolish slavery who accomplished amazing things. And yet:
‘Human trafficking is a modern form of slavery. It is a scourge for humanity’ – Jeff Fortenberry
‘You can’t regulate child labour. You can’t regulate slavery. Some things are just wrong’ – Michael Moore
Describing slavery as ‘a dreadful thing’ in the Nineteenth Century, Harriet Tubman escaped slavery and became an icon of courage and freedom: ‘I think slavery is the next thing to hell. If a person would send another into bondage, he would, it appears to me, be bad enough to send him into hell if he could’.
