The Freedom We Need
Formation, feasting, and the gift of wanting the right things | Issue 11
We hosted friends for July 4th this year. Kids tore through watermelon slices like wolves. Adults circled the grill pretending to know meat temperatures. We traded our traditional beach fireworks (Santa Barbara fog is undefeated) for a new drone show at our kids’ high school which meant fewer explosions, better visibility, and no parking nightmare. Community wins again.
Somewhere between the Target flag tank tops and the synchronized LED bald eagle soaring overhead, I found myself thinking about that word we celebrate: freedom.
Everyone claims it. Everyone wants it.
But if you listen closely, we’re not talking about the same thing.
For some, freedom means personal liberty from tradition, constraint, or imposed belief. My body. My identity. My truth. The right to self-define, break every inherited box, and be ungoverned by yesterday’s values.
For others, freedom means autonomy from government oversight. My property. My rights. My choice not to be told what to do. The right to keep what’s mine, say what I want, and reject intrusion regardless of the common good.
Different vocabularies. Different battle lines. Both chasing the same golden calf: total autonomy.
And that? That’s new. Unprecedented, even.
Freedom From or For?
Most of human history didn’t define freedom as autonomy. Would you believe that freedom used to link arms with becoming the kind of person who could be trusted with responsibility? People used to seek “freedom for,” not “freedom from.”
Consider the founders of this nation back in the late 1700s. Jefferson named liberty as a self-evident right, but he wrestled with his unruly self. Washington spoke of liberty as something to be stewarded, not flaunted. Franklin famously warned that “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”
They weren’t codifying total autonomy, or freedom as raw indulgence. They knew something largely forgotten in our day:
Freedom untethered from virtue doesn’t make you powerful. It makes you fragile. (And eventually, dangerous.)
Let’s be careful here, because this isn’t about who is worthy of freedom. It’s about how any of us becomes capable of wielding freedom well.
No child is born ready for autonomy. They want dessert for dinner, to run into traffic, to scream at strangers in Target. They’re not bad—they’re just unformed. And so we form them.
We apprentice them into personhood. We teach boundaries, kindness, restraint. We teach to prepare them for the beautiful responsibilities that come with being fully human.
It’s the same for us.
Our modern myth conflates freedom with individual autonomy. We believe in the right to throw off every constraint. That the freest person, we are told, has no limits, no obligations, no yoke. But anyone who’s lived more than five minutes knows that’s complete nonsense.
Try building a marriage with total autonomy.
Try raising a family with no obligations.
Try staying rooted in community when your highest allegiance is to personal comfort.
Freedom to Pursue the Good, True, and Beautiful
True freedom doesn’t come from throwing off the yoke. It comes from choosing the right one.
That’s where Augustine takes us.
If you’ve never hung out with him, here’s the cheat sheet: Augustine of Hippo was a fourth-century philosopher, party animal, and eventually bishop. A reluctant saint with a well-documented past. Before his spiritual pivot, he chased everything our modern world still promises will make us whole: sex, success, intellectual prestige, belonging, influence. The man did not hold back.
But after exhausting the buffet of pleasure, status, and philosophical posturing, he found himself starving. Disillusioned. Restless.
At the turn, Augustine didn’t reject human desire, he reexamined it. He realized misdirected desires don’t just distract us; they deform us. We crave fulfillment, but we chase it in all the wrong places. That misalignment? It hollows us out.
For Augustine, freedom requires rightly ordered cravings—our desires, longings, loves. And rightly ordering those desires requires formation.
“You have made us for Yourself, O Lord,” he writes,
“and our heart is restless until it rests in You.”
Read that again. This isn’t embroidered pillow theology. It’s hard-won truth.
Unbridled autonomy with misordered desires doesn’t lead to freedom. It leads to bondage. “Freedom from” (from rules, restraint, responsibility) creates space for those cravings to swell unchecked. As they grow, they start to drive us. Like addicts, we chase oversized appetites for undersized returns. Never satisfied. Always seeking. Eventually enslaved to what we once called freedom.
So here’s the shift: When you order your loves, you invite “freedom for.” Freedom for the good, the true, and the beautiful. Formation, for Augustine, is the long practice of becoming someone who wants what is good. The practice anchored in a belief that submission to the Good, True, and Beautiful is worth it. That aligning your own desires there is real freedom.
And that’s the kicker: True freedom isn’t doing whatever you want. (It never was.) True freedom, “freedom for,” is becoming the kind of person who wants what’s worth doing.
C.S. Lewis’s makes a similar point.
In one of his most retold lines, Lewis observes that we are “half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.” He compares us to children content making mud pies in a slum because we have no idea what a holiday at the sea is like. He concludes, “We are far too easily pleased.”
The kids in the alley aren’t evil. They’re just unformed. Their imaginations haven’t been awakened to what’s possible, so they settle for the messy, familiar pleasures they can see, touch, and control.
Sound familiar? Lewis isn’t scolding the child. He’s exposing the poverty of imagination that leads us to cling to lesser things. Most of us cling not out of rebellion, but out of limitation. We don’t need punishment for liking mud pies. We need someone to show us the ocean.
The way forward isn’t to shame the mud pies. It’s to disciple (or discipline) our imaginations. To awaken a vision of something richer. Fuller. Truer.
Formation does this not by starting with a list of don’ts, but by expanding our appetite for what’s good. By cultivating a soul that knows beauty when it sees it. That chooses depth over distraction. That grows into the kind of freedom that runs not away from rules, but toward what’s worth living for.
We don’t just need boundaries. We need a better vision. We don’t just need discipline. We need desire, properly ordered and deeply nourished. That takes practice, and imagination, and each other.
Freedom, rightly understood, is never just the absence of constraint. It’s the presence of right order; the flourishing of a self that has been made whole through holy submission.
Formation to Freedom
When we apprentice ourselves not to our whims but to wisdom, we discover a strange thing. We don’t become less free. We become more ourselves: alive, rooted, and ready. And that’s what struck me, somewhere between the charred hot dogs and the synchronized drone eagle lighting up the high school sky.
These little acts—pulling folding chairs from the garage, saying yes to potluck chaos, making space for conversations across difference—don’t look like cultural revolution. They don’t trend on social media. But they’re doing something. In us. Around us.
Somewhere in the middle of it all, something deeper was happening.
Formation doesn’t always look spiritual or quiet or alone. Sometimes it looks like showing up. Setting the table. Carrying one another’s burdens and serving baked beans. “Freedom for” means being free to choose presence over polish because I’m not ruled by ambition, pride, or self-interest. Or choosing commitment over convenience, because I’m to carry obligations that encourage and support my wife, my kids, and my friends.
And as my kids watched us host, watched us welcome, watched us flex and forgive and laugh through the mess, I realized they observed more than a holiday gathering. They saw “freedom for” in motion. Not the political freedom we fight to protect, or the unbridled autonomy we might mistakenly strive for, but the kind of freedom that unlocks flourishing.
This kind of freedom isn’t about breaking off every restraint. It’s about learning to love what’s good, right, and beautiful. It’s about apprenticing yourself to joy and fidelity and quiet courage. It’s about letting that right order ripple out—not from a law imposed above, but from a life formed deep within.
And this Independence Day that freedom smelled a little like bug spray and smoked meat.
Reflection Questions
Where in your life are you mistaking autonomy for freedom?
What desires in you feel unformed, misaligned, or in need of gentle reordering?
Who in your life guides you toward the kind of maturity that wants what’s good?
Who are you becoming—and whose formation are you shaping along the way?
Thanks for reading Everyday Formation—a weekly nudge toward sanity-saving practices for busy souls.
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