Freedom before Freedom came
It is quite pleasing to the eye on a tourist bus. The lime quarry is bright and driving into its ravine with the cave in front of you. It would have been a very different place had you been brought out here day after day in the heat of the South African sun to toil for little or no reason in regimented tediousness. The eye got a very different experience, with the glare of the sun off limestone. But it was here that Nelson Mandela and his colleagues came. Their eyes would be damaged permanently. When they operated on Mandela’s eyes late in his life they found a layer of lime dust from these particular years of his incarceration.
It was here though that the prisoners of Apartheid turned their chain gang into a University. It was here that they taught their comrades to read and write, to add and subtract, to develop their political acumen. It was here, when their white warders wanted to stop their lessons, that they coined the concept of reconciliation and welcomed their captors into their open air lecture hall. White prison guards on Robben Island had the inmates to thank for the many qualifications they earned on the island. It truly is a remarkable place.
It was another of the post graduate prisoners who threw out a phrase that maybe unlocked the secret of this place of worked out redemption. He said to us, “We were getting ready for freedom before freedom came.” In this place where any hopes or dreams of freedom were delusional at the very best here were guys who no matter what the circumstances lived with hope and belief and a resolute confidence that freedom would eventually come. It was their job to get ready. That Nelson Mandela left a prison cell and within a few short years had become the most respected President and world leader in decades if not centuries is evidence enough of the success in the University of Robben Island.
I don’t think it is too contrived for me to make a comparison from these captives on Robben Island believing with conviction in another Kingdom where they would take places in government to those of us caught up in the chains of the temporal, fallen world dreaming dreams and seeing visions of another Kingdom where redemption is complete; heaven a reality. Those of us claiming to be on a journey, following Jesus to heaven, need to be about the business of getting ready for heaven when it arrives. That is our life work. Theologians call the personal aspect of the getting ready “sanctification” and the social aspect “mission.” If Christianity is about anything it is about putting into our hearts and onto our earth the indelible marks of heaven. Preparing for who we will be and how the streets of the city will look on that glorious day.
We need to be as committed to this and as convicted in our belief as those prisoners on Robben Island. It kept them alive, literally, in the midst of the injustice and brutality but it did so much more. As they prepared for freedom, for that moment up ahead when the sheer ecstasy of freedom would be announced, they brought little flashes of freedom into their midst. Like that education that they earned. Like those wardens who learned alongside them in a world of ridiculous reconciliation. Like the hope in their hearts that all things utterly impossible would some day come to pass. And so as we ready ourselves for the other side we will leave a trail of transcendent moments when love, justice, mercy and grace touch this cruel world with kindness. An HIV/AIDS infected mother will receive the medication, a pot bellied child will eat food, a worker will get a fair wage for the groceries that make us so fortunate, an enemy will know the reaching out of a forgiving hand and God will know his creation better looked after with more thought to the environment. People get ready...
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