My mom raised me to love the 80’s, especially Molly Ringwald. Sixteen Candles is my all time favorite Molly movie , but The Breakfast Club also holds a special place in my heart. I hope you’ve seen The Breakfast Club, if you haven’t I’ll still try to speak truth to you…but watch the movie.
So the movie starts out with a disparate group of high school students. The princess, the athlete, the outcast, the brain, and the rebel are all confined to their school library serving a Saturday detention. They each have a chance to share their own personal stories of the pressure in their lives, and come to find that they are not really as different as they once thought. They all face the same pressures to be accepted by their parents, their friends, and themselves. They wonder then at the end of the movie if school will ever really be the same because of their new found freedom. They now have the freedom to open up to themselves and others, and share the struggles they are going through.
This made me think of my adult life now, and the new level of pressures I face. Wife life, Motherhood, adulting, work life, social life. All of these things bring pressure when we let them. I think sometimes as an adult we are prisoners to our loneliness as we go through these pressures. We think others have it all together, that they don’t understand, and that we must try our darnedest to not let them see us failing.
I think this because I’m guilty of it. I’m guilty of the pressure of comparison, the pressure of maintaining my worth, the pressure of staying in control. It’s really exhausting. But what’s even more frustrating is that I know there is a freedom from all of this, and I don’t pursue it near hard enough. And if I don’t pursue it, knowing how freeing it can be, who is going to hand it out to others? How can others be free if no one else is strong enough to lead them to freedom?
“But how can they call on him to save them unless they believe in him? And how can they believe in him if they have never heard about him? And how can they hear about him unless someone tells them?”
Romans 10:14 NLT
We have to be more intentional and authentic with the people in our lives. We have to put down our phones, put down our fronts, get off our stages, and meet people right where they are. We need our own breakfast clubs. Lock us all up somewhere to tell truths, so that we too can be free from the labels we’ve put on ourselves.
Truth says that we are already free if we want to be. Our freedom was bought and paid for a long time ago by a God who’s just waiting for us to accept it. That’s the truth we need to be speaking to each other in our breakfast clubs, over coffee, at dinner tables, and on living room floors.
What would happen to our relationships if we took more time to share God’s freedom? What would happen to our workplaces, our schools, our communities, ourselves? What would happen if we all began living the free life?
One of my favorite Christian songs right now is Death was Arrested by North Point InsideOut. The last two verses say this:
“Released from my chains I’m a prisoner no more
My shame was a ransom He faithfully bore
He cancelled my debt and He called me His friend
When death was arrested and my life began
Oh, Your grace so free
Washes over me
You have made me new
Now life begins with You
It’s your endless love
Pouring down on us
You have made us new
Now life begins with You
Our savior displayed on a criminal’s cross
Darkness rejoiced as though heaven had lost
But then Jesus arose with our freedom in hand
That’s when death was arrested and my life began”
“But then Jesus arose with our Freedom in hand,” I know it’s silly but when I hear this line, I always picture Jesus with his fist in the air just like Judd Nelson at the end of The Breakfast Club. John Bender was finally free from being just the rebel. He no longer had to bear the pressures of his life alone.
We can rise up from the pressures in this life with our freedom in hand just as victoriously. We can walk straight into a brand new life. The kids from The Breakfast Club may not have been raising their fists for the freedom in Christ, but they taught me that I need to do a much better job of accepting and sharing the truth.
Fit Grit & Grace 