I used to think of myself as fiscally conservative, morally moderate, and socially liberal. But since having delved into the Gospel, I have found that the word “liberal” means something different to everyone and even to me.

I’ve grown to know that the God that loves me wants my freedom. I’m going to state that again. The God that loves me wants my freedom. I needed to repeat that because as a recovering Catholic, filled with lessons of all the rules I needed to follow in the hope I’d be good enough, I thought it was all about the confines of the rules. And that I’d never be good enough. Are any of us? But when I read the Gospel, it told me a different story. It told me about my freedom. My liberty I would find in Jesus. Freedom? How is that possible?

My conservative fiscal ideology is on par with the biblical concept of being a good steward of what I’ve been given so that aligned, gratefully. My morally moderate thoughts didn’t and that concerned me; and a liberal socially? Well, my definition of liberal was defined by freedoms. It seems today the term liberal has been hijacked by groups that want to suppress liberty for anyone except for their own agenda. That’s not freedom.

Come back next week for Part II in this series on Freedom.