I’m 50 and I’m Free.

It was just yesterday I was building a tree fort in the trees behind our house in Hillsboro. It wasn’t that long ago I was waiting on customers at Copeland Lumber and wondering whether I’d be doing that for the rest of my life. I remember my first Television Job in Coos Bay. I was so excited to finally be starting my career. That was in 1985. What happened? Where did all that time go?

Today I turn 50 years of age. I find that unbelievable and yet very significant. In Jewish Culture 50 years was considered the Jubilee.

It’s defined in Leviticus 25:9 as “Yovel” in Hebrew, as the Sabbatical Year.

50 is considered a special year for the remission of sins and universal pardon where debts are forgiven, slaves and prisoners freed and the mercies of God would be particularly manifest. It was a time when those who had sold themselves into slavery, were set free. Their inheritance, that had been traded or given away, was returned.

So what does that mean to me?

The past 18 months of my life has been a dying process. Idea’s and attitudes that once enslaved no longer hold me. The idea that once said “I had to” replaced with “I get to.” I’ve lost the desire to live up to the expectations of others and instead live in expectancy. You see, I had become a slave to what and who people thought I should be. I traded my true inheritance for something that wasn’t real.

I truly have been set free. But freedom is not a one-time deal. It takes time and practice to actually live that way. I still have some debts to forgive and I plan to take that very seriously, but here’s the deal, I sense God’s Universal Pardon is upon me. The most difficult aspect of freedom is remembering that the chains that once held you no longer have the power to hold. And if God is willing to pardon me, I must pardon those who have imprisoned me and that includes forgiving myself.

So I will celebrate “Yovel”, my Sabbatical Year. I will fight, not for a cause or justice but for the freedom to serve God. I will remind myself that I owe no one. I am no longer a slave to religion, to man’s idea of whom God is, to someone’s theology, to culture or man’s attempt to control through ideas, legislation or manipulation.

I’m 50 and I’m free. Lookout there’s no telling what’s going to happen now.

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