As Christians reflect upon their...
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As Christians reflect upon their freedom as the children of God, they cannot adequately do so without recognizing the profundity of spiritual slavery. An excellent study of the bondage of the spirit is William Golding's novel Free Fall. In the story Samuel Mountjoy is the illegitimate son of a prostitute living in an English slum, Rotten Row. Bereaved of his mother, Sammy is raised by a priest of the Church of England. He grows up to be an artist, marries, fathers a child and is whisked off to war. What haunts Sam is a love affair of his youth that ends in tragedy for his love, Beatrice. He peels away incident after incident in his life to discover what it was that made him destroy the life of another. He thoroughly examines the lives of all those who touched his to determine what influence they had on him. He reconstructs his life so that the reader can analyze what forces of influences shaped his behavior. The burning question for Sam was, "Where did I lose my freedom?" The answer could not be found in any one person or any one single event. As the apostle indicates, one can deal with spiritual bondage only if one faces the reality of how pervasive sin is. -- Huxhold
