Did you know you are free?
Sometimes we forget. Sometimes we don’t really believe it. Sometimes we don’t even know.
President Abraham Lincoln welcomed in the new year in 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation—declaring freedom for all enslaved persons throughout the United States.
Unfortunately, this did not usher in the end of slavery. There were those who did not want the news to get out and follow-through required military enforcement.
So there were many people who had no idea that they could now claim their own personhood. That they no longer had to work for free. That they were, indeed, free.
Some 250,000 people in Texas alone.
On June 19, 1865, over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, General Gordon Granger made it Galveston, Texas, where he announced the news—but it would take several months for it to reach all those people. Many wouldn’t find out until after the harvest was done.
There are many reasons why a person might miss out on the good news that we are free. But let’s not let one of them be because we ourselves don’t really believe it. That we let ourselves forget.
African Americans began celebrating June 19 (which came to be known as Juneteenth) as Independence Day from slavery—and today everyone in the United States gets to celebrate it as a national holiday.
Juneteenth happens to fall on the day after my birthday. It is a gift to celebrate freedom and to be reminded how history can repeat itself—to be on the alert.
Is there any good news that you are having trouble believing?
In what ways do you feel stuck, limited, bound up right now?
What external factors are involved?
Are there things that are simply not OK that you are ignoring?
What can you do?
Where do you feel tied up inside?
What outside voices and inherited patterns pull you back, away from freedom to live and be?
What voices do you give authority to?
What would it feel like to really believe?
Let’s claim our freedom and, in turn, show up in the ways that only we can to extend that knowledge and possibility to others—wherever we can.
“I, yes I, am the one who comforts you.
So why are you afraid of mere humans,
who wither like the grass and disappear?
Yet you have forgotten the Lord, your Creator,
the one who stretched out the sky like a canopy
and laid the foundations of the earth.
Will you remain in constant dread of human oppressors?
Will you continue to fear the anger of your enemies?
Where is their fury and anger now?
It is gone!
Soon all you captives will be released!
Imprisonment, starvation, and death will not be your fate!
For I am the Lord your God,
who stirs up the sea, causing its waves to roar.
My name is the Lord of Heaven’s Armies.
And I have put my words in your mouth
and hidden you safely in my hand.
I stretched out the sky like a canopy
and laid the foundations of the earth.”(Isaiah 51:12-16 NLT).