DAY 22
Devotional by Ashley Weekley
I’ve been trying to give a lot of thought to what freedom means to me. It’s a hard thing to think of, because I know what freedom should mean—it should mean that I’ve gotten to a place in my walk with Christ where I rely on Him fully and lean not on my own understanding. But what does that look like? How do I get there? As I prayed about what this meant and what I was going to share, my life literally got rocked and I was taught the hard way what freedom meant.
For the past few months, I have been working on a very important project at work and until this weekend, when the project came to its fruition with a worship night, I didn’t realize it, but I was operating in a spirit of fear. The night before the event, I was driving a rental car and someone ran a stop sign and hit me on the driver’s side. Before I even knew what was happening, the airbags had deployed and smoke was everywhere. The force of the impact had caused me to hit another car on my right, so essentially I was pinned and couldn’t get out of the car. Important note, car accidents are my #1 fear! I used to have nightmares about getting into them and for a while it got so bad that I was only comfortable in a car if I was the one driving it. My fear started manifesting in the form of control.
Back to that night, I couldn’t tell you what happened. I don’t know if it was because I was in a work car or knew that car was needed to pick up Kim Walker-Smith in a few hours, but in that moment I wasn’t afraid. I knew I was okay and I had a job to do. After climbing out of the back of the car, I went straight into work mode and called everyone I needed to call to make sure the rest of the evening was taken care of. I then went home and prepared for the rest of the event. Saturday was a blur with interviews and sound checks and it wasn’t up until Kim actually started to sing that it hit me.
During the entire planning process of this event, I was living my life in fear. Fear of disappointing my bosses, fear of messing up the event, fear of honestly not being worthy enough to run a worship night with someone like Kim Walker-Smith, fear of not being a good worship leader myself—I was seriously afraid of everything. You would have never known it looking at me. I was the picture of cool, calm and collected because like I said earlier, my fear was starting to manifest itself as control. As long as I was in control, my fears wouldn’t come true. But Friday night I was completely out of control. I am not saying that God let me get into a car accident to stop being afraid. I am saying that He turned what was meant for evil into good. I know the devil was literally trying to take me out that night and when the devil uses one of your biggest fears to try to end your life you have two choices: either let fear consume you or find freedom. “For the Lord is the spirit, and wherever the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” 2 Corinthians 3:17 NLT
The Lord was with me Friday night. He is with me always. Freedom is with me ALWAYS. For me, freedom now means the absence of fear; I’m not going to be afraid. I pray that it doesn’t take a situation like this for you to find freedom, I pray that you can start trusting God and walk in freedom knowing the truth. However, no matter what happens, be reminded that your life is for freedom, your call is for freedom. God wants you to be so free in Him that everything you do is for freedom.