Midweek Message: July 2, 2025

What IS Freedom?

This Friday, we celebrate and appreciate the freedom we have in the United States. Victor Frankl, a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp who was anything but free, said, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” What Viktor understood is that true freedom is something we have within us more than what is given to us by an outside person, organization, or country. 

Therefore, we should be grateful not only for political or physical freedom and also for the opportunity to become everything we were meant to be—if we choose to pursue it.

How Free Are You?

To understand how free you truly feel, ask yourself: Am I genuinely free? Free from fear, worry, discontent, and self-pity? Perhaps the answer may be no for you, or someone you care about. Usually, the root cause when this is the case is because we live our lives based on others' expectations or in reaction to others' actions. We have failed to take responsibility for creating the life we want. We work jobs that don’t satisfy us, maintain relationships that don’t support us, and engage in activities that don’t nourish us. We live in bondage not only to what is done to us but also to our limited thinking.

Declare Your Independence

This July 4^th, I challenge you to break free from the chains of bondage to discover your true self and be free, free to be who God intended you to be. Free to stop playing the victim in life and realize that you are a volunteer—and you get to decide what you are volunteering for in this life, when you choose how YOU want to respond in the space where your power lies, as Viktor Frankl observed over 80 years ago.

Quote of the Week:

“Freedom is the oxygen of the soul.”  ~Moshe Dayan

What would you most like to free yourself from thinking or feeling this week? If you were writing your own "Declaration of Independence" this year, what would you declare? Please share in comments, and I hope to meet you in-person at Unity Center of Pittsburgh when I speak on the last Sunday of July and the first Sunday of August!