Recently I was reading the Marcia Williams Dickens book to my Petely. (If you need a last-minute gift for a child, we are all Marcia Williams fans here.) Dickens, of course, knew his prisons. This time through the cartoon version of A Tale of Two Cities I was struck by its sketch of the Bastille. I could imagine the gloom, the stench, the hopelessness -- a place so wretched that Dr. Manette could not seem to believe he was no longer its prisoner.
I was 16 when I first tasted Christian freedom, sweet and heady. I was a senior in high school and I was miserable: striving desperately to be valedictorian, locked in a struggle with my parents over where I would go the next year. I went on a retreat where I met Christ as a Person for the first time. On Sunday morning after that Saturday night encounter, I sat down in the quiet and read the letter to the Galatians.
The fifth chapter took my breath away. Jesus was saying to me, "Jamie, you don't have to live this way, trapped in perfectionism and fear. Wouldn't you rather be free?" And I said, as I have tried to say every day since then, "Oh, yes. Yes, thank you."
The Key of David does not merely open the door and let the prisoners discover, if they can, that their jailer has been deposed. I am thinking about the end of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, when Aslan and his army turn out the Witch's dungeons. "Leave no corner unsearched!" said Aslan. Our liberator seeks us out and leads us forth, blinking, into the sunlight. Lead me.
you who open and no one closes,
who close and no one opens,
come, and lead forth from prison the conquered,
idling in darkness and the shadow of death.
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