Desperado #4

Desperado,

Ohhhh you aint getting no younger.

Your pain and your hunger,

They're driving you home.

And freedom, ohh freedom.

Well that's just some people talking.

Your prison is walking through this world all alone.

Don't your feet get cold in the winter time?

The sky won't snow and the sun won't shine.

It's hard to tell the night time from the day.

And you're losing all your highs and lows

aint it funny how the feeling goes

away...

There are so many bits that resonate for me in these lines--
 
When a person grows up in a difficult situation, it is pain and hunger that can drive us to find our way, finally, to our true and real home.  Some of us are born into the place that is, and will forever be, our heart's home, but for the rest of us, home is a place that we need to find -- or perhaps create.  We grow up in places that are not "home."  We suffer, often invisibly, from the pain of not belonging; from the pain of being always the outsider; from the pain of not finding a welcome in the place where we are.  That reality creates a hunger that will not be satisfied.  Outcasts in our own families, those of us who grow up apart from those to whom we are born, are driven to seek and search and find our way home.
 
And freedom?  Always, the question of what it means to be "free" strikes a chord in my slave's heart. Those of us who carry that self-descriptor, are often confronted by people who make judgements about us based on their own visceral reactions to the word.  Over the years, I've had people who knew almost nothing about me -- total strangers -- declare that what I do is grounded in emotional neediness, immaturity, co-dependency, abuse, and a whole host of other ugly and bizarre judgements.  None of those things have any truth or validity, but they do reflect a prevailing view in our society.  I've had to learn not to put much stock in "people talking."  I can, if I allow myself to see myself through the jaundiced eye of mean-hearted strangers, find myself in a lonely prison built out of the wisps of their words. 

I have to remember the central and essential paradox that MY freedom derives from the deliberately unequal balance between He and I.  I am most free when I am completely and securely His.  What makes the world seem cold or dark or flat or without joy is to find myself outside of His control.  When that becomes the norm and the regular pattern of our days and our weeks and our months, then, and only then do I find myself in "desperado" mode.

swan