The Freedom of Obeying.

Get as much education as you can, because no one can take that away from you.

These are the words I heard from my Grandfather, Dr. Howard E. Heggestad, during a phone call a few days before he died. I can still hear his voice, can picture the bedroom in the crappy apartment where I was living during my first year of marriage when this conversation occurred, can still feel the tears on my cheek.These words were not a suggestion, not advice; they were a command. His sentence was an imperative.And this command has sustained me the past seven (seven!) years that I have been working on a Ph.D. in theology. I just finished. Thanks be to God, I successfully defended my dissertation. A picture of my Grandfather hangs above the desk where I wrote my dissertation, a picture in which he thoughtfully has his fist closed in front of his mouth. I would often pause in my work, look up at him, and then find that I was sitting in the same position. How strong is the momentum of genetics, and how wonderful is that command, that imperative, that has hung over these challenging years of an advanced degree. That command gave me life.Which is a strange thing about commands. Not all of them, but some of them, instead of confining actually confer space and freedom and life.Such is the case with the commands in Scripture. The ones that get the most press are the Ten Commandments–Don't do these things; Do these other things–but commands run throughout all of the Bible, and all of them give life, rather than take it away. All of them move us into abundance, rather than depriving us of something vital.

Pray without ceasing.Be joyful.Mourn with those who mourn.Love your enemies.Taste and see that the Lord is good.Do not covet.Do not be afraid.

Commands, all. All in the imperative. And all life-giving. Because they come from the God who made us, the God who loves us, the God who gave himself for us.I found out later that that command from my Grandpa had a lived history behind it. His father had told him the same thing, during the years of the Depression when indeed a great many things were being taken away. My Grandpa knew the loss of those years, knew the grief of something being taken away, including the loss of his brother to a Japanese sniper in World War II. So this command, this imperative, had a history to it, a lived wisdom. That was part of its vitality, part of why it was so sustaining.So too with the commands in Scripture. They can be trusted because they have been lived; obedience to these commands has been tried and the life that arises from these imperatives has not been found wanting.Thomas Merton, upon entering the sparse cell that would be his home during many years of cloistered existence as a monk, spoke the following words:

The four walls of my new found freedom.

The commands of the Bible, from the Prophets, from Jesus, from Paul, are indeed walls. There is confinement in these imperatives, and this confinement is not always easy. But in this confinement, in these walls, is sustaining, abundant life–life in the presence of God, and in the lived wisdom of the people of God.