What an absolute blessing it was to create with and participate in a worship service with our children and youth! I noticed many ways we were practicing freedom together—giving them courage by listening carefully as they spoke bravely from the pulpit, participating in the activities they wanted to share with us, being curious and asking them questions about their interests, and sharing our own thoughts about freedom.

It’s important to note that the practice of freedom started some time ago, however, when we decided to be a community that should create a safe space for our children and youth to courageously express themselves. To be a community that practices freedom with our children and youth is to strive to affirm them for who they are, for the joys and sorrows they carry with them, for their creativity, their likes and dislikes, and the stories they want to share with us. When we endeavor to support them as they share, teach them, guide them gently, let them know they have a community that loves them and tell them they are not alone, then they can feel the barriers of judgement and criticism lifted—and they share with us. And when they share more freely with us about who they are, it opens our own hearts, brings us joy, and a feeling of freedom. And we can learn a whole lot from them, too! The practice of freedom is a reciprocal process.

It is good, as adults, to let go of the same expectations that we had placed on us growing up and to reflect on what expectations are reasonable and healthy, and which ones actually hindered our abilities to express ourselves. Let us not burden our children with those same freedom blocking practices. As our anchor quote for the month reads: “…Loosening our grip on what we think we know will be exactly what saves us…The freer we become inside ourselves, the freer our world will be…” —Andrea Gibson, The Mind is a cage. Here’s the key.