Debt Free

There is a financial radio program that I sometimes have a chance to listen to in the car by a guy named Dave Ramsey. I've read a few of his books and gone through a class designed by him and I wholeheartedly agree with his financial principles, however difficult it can be to implement them. He is anti-debt. If you decide to follow his plan, one of the first things you will find yourself doing is paying off all debt, except for your home mortgage. . . . although paying off the mortgage does come later. He also does an excellent job of changing your mind about debt, so that you want to be free of it as much as he does.

By far, one of my favorite parts of his show is when he features the debt-free callers. Every so often, he sets aside a portion of his time on the air to take calls from those people who have been diligently following his financial principles and have finally reached the point of being debt-free. He asks them how much debt they have paid off, how long it took, and what lengths they went to to reach their goal--taking additional jobs, selling cars or furniture and the like. After they answer all those questions, he gives them their big chance, the opportunity they've been waiting for since they started paying down their bills however many months or years before: the chance to scream at the top of their lungs on national radio, "I'M DEBT FREEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!".

Every time, without fail, I tear up. I always think that I'm used to it now and it won't affect me the same way it did at first, but I'm wrong. I tear up EVERY time. The joy and the freedom in their voices as they exult in their release from bondage moves me EVERY time. It's like remembering afresh what that financial burden really does feel like, since after a while in this debt-entrenched culture, we're mostly numb to it. And then it's imagining what it will feel like someday, when the burden is finally lifted. It's beautiful and honorable and powerful each and EVERY time. I look forward to the day when I can make that phone call.

It occurred to me that, if the radio show existed for a different sort of emancipation, I would make a call. You see, even though we are still paying for the equity line on our house, I do know what it feels like to be released from bondage. I have been set free--in the most unadulterated sense of the word. The only difference is that I didn't work to have my burden lifted. Someone else lifted it for me. Someone else who is also anti-debt, who also changed my mind. Someone else paid the penalty for all my poor choices, for my toxic preoccupation with myself, and all the hideous, hurtful things I have said and done. Someone else offset my enormous debt with an astonishing bail-out plan that I did not earn and do not deserve. And I have no hope of repaying it. But I will spend the rest of my life being grateful for it. And longing to show anyone else who is burdened with debt that they also can be set free. I will throw my head back and scream at the top of my lungs with a voice full of unbridled joy and wild abandon, "I AM DEBT FREEEEEEEEEE!!!"