SOMETHING to THINK ABOUT as WE CELEBRATE INDEPENDENCE DAY
Grace and peace to all!
I am sharing this column from Chpl. Glen Krans, who expresses what it means to truly celebrate the 4th of July. I could not have written a better column:
This year the United States of America is 240 years old. That seems like a long time for a nation to remain free. But consider what a brief time we’ve really been here as a nation: When Thomas Jefferson died, Abraham Lincoln was a young man of 17. When Lincoln was assassinated, Woodrow Wilson was a boy of 8. By the time Wilson died Ronald Reagan was a boy of 12. There you have it: the lives of four men can take you all the way back to the beginning of our country.
We are young and yet we stand tall among the world’s nations because of the principles on which we were established: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”.
This is what we celebrate: the inalienable rights that we have and the fact that we believe they have been given to us by God. Both truths are important. We can debate whether God has blessed us with liberty and therefore we are free, or whether we have wisely and simply built our liberty based on biblical principles. In either case our freedom is from God.
When America was first established as a nation, the feeling was that God had given us an opportunity to do something great! Our democratic society was to be run by rules that embody the idea that each person had value and each person had rights. AND THERE WAS ALWAYS AN UNDERCURRENT OF DEPENDENCE ON GOD AND GRATITUDE FOR HIS DIVINE GUIDANCE. The 19th century French writer, de Tocqueville, after visiting in America in 1831, said, “America is great because America is good. And, if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”
This is an important part of what it means to say, “In God We Trust”. It’s not just a slogan, a tip of the hat to the man upstairs, a hopeful expression that God will continue to favor us as a nation and shower us with blessings as individuals. It means that our lives are built upon faith and trust; on respect for each other based on a goodness that God has taught us, and upon the belief that the very future of our free society is in God’s hands.
On this Independence Day weekend we confess that our freedoms and our blessings as Americans are gifts from God. These are gifts that cannot be repaid—that’s the nature of a gift. But there is a debt of gratitude that our hearts recognize and that we willingly take on. “In God We Trust” also speaks of that debt. God Bless America!
Every Blessing,
Chaplain Glen Krans
