I hate feeling like I am being held captive.  I mean,who doesn’t?  That feeling of not having control, mostly – and trust me, I know the feeling.  If it weren’t for the Lord and the people in my life, I could wallow in the misery of feeling of captivity – but don’t worry, I don’t.  For instance, when I am sick, my seizures increase and I am held captive by those.  Some of my seizures include waking from sleeping with no recollection of anything from the day before.  Or when I am in the middle of my tremor seizures and can hear everything around me but can’t stop the tremors.  Or when my whole body freezes and locks up and I can’t move.  The main feeling when any of my seizures happen is that I am held captive in my own body.

Another feeling of captivity is sin.  Many believers are familiar with this passage of scripture in Romans 7: 21-23:

Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.

Just like Paul, and I am sure many other believers, I tire of the same routine of sinfulness.  It is like grabbing the chains of sin that were already taken off of me by my Lord that I try to string back around me, as if they were some kind of a comforting blanket.  Why do I do that – go back to the same old sins and captivity? Even though they are looser version of older sins and no longer hold quite the same power because I have grown in Christ and now see them for what they are; and even though I disgust of them within days,still I turn to them – my odd prison of comfort.

But don’t we all do that?  Those little sins that are really actually big because they are “ours”.  The ones we don’t want to let go of, not that we can’t because God’s Word tells us that we can do all things in Him.  But the ones we go to when…we are alone, feeling overwhelmed, abandoned, confused, or whatever the case may be.  The ones we basically hold on to because we don’t turn to God in those specific circumstances.

What is really ironic about this time is that while I was struggling with the concepts of feeling like I was in captivity and struggling to keep my body moving, little did I know that there were workings happening outside to actually make me a prisoner.  There was a 9-year-old arrest warrant for a bad check with my name on it waiting to be served, waiting for me to be arrested and taken to jail.

To be continued…….