FREE TO BE YOU AND ME

For many years, eleven, in fact, I led the Senior High Camp at the Peterkin Conference Center in West Virginia. Every year we would choose a theme for the 12 or so days my staff and I had 100 or so teenagers under our supervision and care. Hormones ran wild. Teenage angst was rampant: Who am I? Who will I be today. What will I be someday? For, as the Prayer for Young Persons puts it, they were “growing up in an unsteady and confusing world.” They still are today.

One summer we used the theme from Marlo Thomas’ song Free to Be You and Me. The words were apropos back then and still are today: “There's a land that I see where the children are free/And I say it ain't far to this land from where we are./Take my hand, come with me, where the children are free/Come with me, take my hand, and we'll live,

“In a land where the river runs free/In a land through the green country/In a land to a shining sea/And you and me are free to be you and me. I see a land bright and clear, and the time's comin' near/When we'll live in this land, you and me, hand in hand./Take my hand, come along, lend your voice to my song/Come along, take my hand, sing a song.”

Some may say the words are silly or childish, but I would beg to differ. The song was a reminder to them (and to us) that as confused as they were about the present and the future (and so are we today), it would only become better if they (and we) walked hand in hand together. They (and we) cannot make this world what God created it to be all by ourself. It is a community (small and large) project. Always has been and always will be.

That is what a community of faith is all about: people of all ages, of all sorts and conditions, or all sorts of opinions, likes and dislikes, working and walking hand in hand together. We are freed up to be who we are and not who someone else wants us to be, which is so much of what those young people were dealing with back then and with they are still dealing with today.

When Jesus called together his followers, he chose people of all sorts and conditions knowing that each had a special gift for the community to be able to carry on his ministry once he left. And they did. They were free to be who each was in order for the community to be and become what it was supposed to be. It was not easy and is still not and probably never will be, but that is life in a confusing and unsteady world.

Those young people are now adults with teenagers of their own who are struggling with the same issues their parents dealt with. Unfortunately, they and we are still looking for and creating that land where the river runs free, where each of us is free to be who we are. We may never arrive at such a place, but it is a vision we need to hold onto when the going gets rough, knowing that we will make it through, as they did, only if we take one another’s hand.