When I was a preacher, I was preaching one Sunday about freedom and I used the image of breaking out of a box.

And then as preachers frequently do, I got into a little bit of a rant.

And I started talking about how we're just surrounded by little boxes in which we live our lives.

We wake up in a box called a bed, in a box called

a bedroom, and we look at the box called our clock to see what time it is, and then we go into

the box of our bathroom and look in a box of a mirror, and then get in a rectangular box called

a shower. Then we go to the box of the closet or the drawer to get our clothes and then we go

to the kitchen where we open a box of a cupboard and take out a box of cereal and eat our breakfast

and then get in the box of our car to go to the box of our office where we find the box of our

cubicle and we look in the box of our screen all day

until we go home to the box of our home on the square block that is a kind of box

where we watch the box of a TV until we go to bed and we do it all again the next day.

We live in the boxes of our external world, and in some ways they really do reflect boxes

in our internal world. Man-made structures, and we very often can't see anything outside of them.

There's a story in the Gospel of John, chapter 9, where Jesus is walking along

and he comes upon a man who has been blind from birth. And immediately we start to see people's boxes.

The disciples say, who sinned this man or his parents that he was born blind? So you can

understand in their box, if something bad happens, there's somebody to blame. And they're intrigued by

the question if someone is born blind, how can they be blamed for the wrong that made them

blind?

And so Jesus basically answers by saying,

I'm not working inside of your box at all.

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