Find Your Freedom

Have you seen this meme?  I saw it several years ago on Facebook and read some of the comments, many of which were either along the lines of “Same!” or “First world problem: Suck it up and welcome to responsible adulthood.”  Once upon a time, I would have agreed with both statements.  I felt like this every day for many years AND battled the guilt caused by knowing that I was very blessed.  I prayed almost daily for God to change my heart and align my will with His.  However, the feeling that something wasn’t right only grew. (Spoiler alert…it’s because so much of our modern way of life is completely against His will!!)

Therefore, I started examining my life to try to understand why I felt this way and more importantly, what I was supposed to do about it.  What I found was that I wanted a life of freedom.  However, as I tried to figure out how to pursue a life of freedom, I also discovered that “freedom” is not the absence of structure or work.  Freedom is the ability to devote quality time to the people, causes, and things that matter most to you while remaining in integrity with your true core values. (And essentially, it’s the absence of stress caused by the constraints of modern societal expectations imposed by the standarized industrialist mind control program that has been influencing our country’s culture for the past hundred plus years.)

According to a core values assessment that I took about a decade ago, my top three core values are Family/Friends, Adventure, and Impact/Making a Difference.  At the time, I was a teacher. During our track outs and days off, I had time to devote to relationships with family and friends and by society’s standards, I was making a difference in the lives of my students, and every day is an adventure in school because you never know what’s going to happen!  So what was the problem?

For me, the problem was that I was working in a predictable system that ultimately goes against my core values.  Like every parent, I want the best for my children and in my opinion, our current public-school system is failing our children.  (School = separating family members, forcing kids to conform to developmentally inappropriate standards, following a strict predictable schedule, being inside more than outside, and teaches that competition and achievement matter more than relationships and recognizing individual gifts.).  My children were going to school and learning in this same standardized system.  Therefore, I didn’t feel like I was truly making a difference as a teacher or being a good parent by keeping my kids in “the system”.  I actually came to believe that I was doing more harm than good by being a teacher, which was a disturbing revelation.

Furthermore, every day was a predictable set of events that involved very little risk and yet, my second core value, adventure, by definition means “an undertaking usually involving danger and unknown risks” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/adventure).  Additionally, during my time off, I was either working another job and/or trying to figure out how to pay all our bills with my teacher salary, so I wasn’t actually physically, emotionally, or mentally available to focus on nurturing the relationships in my life that meant the most to me. 

Therefore, even though it appeared that I was living a life aligned with my core values, in fact, I was not.

Are you living a life of freedom?  

What does freedom look like to you?  

These are the steps I followed to map out our journey to freedom:

Step 1 - Determine your core values (and your spouse’s if you are married):  

It is important to understand first what you value in order to know what freedom might look like to you.  For example, the life that we were living could have been what freedom looked like for some people whose core values are security, tradition, and family.  Furthermore, even if you have the same core values as us, your interests, skills, and life experiences will ultimately paint a different image of freedom than ours.

Step 2 - Analyze how well you are living in alignment with your core values: 

Usually, we don’t have it all wrong.  In my own experience outlined above, I was on the right track.  I had a career that allowed me to be off work the same time as my children (family), that time off allowed us to do some travel (adventure), and I was influencing young minds (making a difference).  Sometimes this analysis is difficult, especially when your life appears to be aligned with your core values, like mine did.  This is when lots of prayer, critical reflection, questioning the status quo, and soul searching comes into play.

Step 3 - Make the changes necessary to truly align your life with your core values: 

This is often the hardest step because it requires change and can be risky.  However, it is the step that is vital in changing your life from one reflected in the meme above to one that you love.  We had to sell everything, travel around the country in a RV living off savings and working my butt off at odd hours of the day/night so that we didn’t deplete our savings in order to make this change in our lives.  Change like this isn’t easy and it isn’t as glamorous as it sounds, but it is way better than driving to work every day feeling like I’m not where I’m supposed to be and I’m failing my kids. 

Are you ready to make the change and start living your life of freedom? 

What hurdles do you think you’ll encounter? 

Do you know your core values?

If not, or if it’s been awhile*, this FREE Guide will help you clarify or reassess your core values.

*It’s a good idea to reassess your values anytime you’ve gone through a major life transition because often our eyes are opened to new perspectives during those seasons that shift what’s most important to us.