Get Busy Livin'
There is this a great scene in Shawshank Redemption when Morgan Freeman’s character Red, who is an old man that has been in prison since he was a teenager, is before a parole board for the umpteenth time. The chairman asks if Red considers himself to be sufficiently ‘rehabilitated’. In Red’s response he says that there isn’t a day that goes by that he doesn’t wish he could talk to his teenage self and impart the perspective that he’s been able to attain through years of hard and monotonous prison life – perspective about the value of life, the nature of good and evil and the importance of responsibility. As I work with young people in the pivotal years of junior high, high school and college – years of self-discovery, transition and commitment – I’m so often reminded of that scene. When I get in front of a group of passionate and gifted young Christians, the message that I find myself wanting to articulate time and again is that we can only experience true freedom through the gra