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Independence Day

Two hundred and fifty years ago, our lands were occupied by families who wanted nothing more than to live out their lives quietly and without restriction upon their religious expressions and beliefs. They had spent decades, even centuries under the oppression of civil governments who sought to control the populace by controlling their religion. They escaped to the American continent. For a time, they enjoyed some sense of isolation and self-rule, but it was not long before the unreasonable King George of England desired to increase his revenue by unfairly taxing the colonies, refusing to allow them to be represented in his court. The British Empire had colonies all over the world, but this time King George abused the wrong people.

The character of this gestating new nation was such that they willingly hazarded the threats of an ocean voyage, settling for the rough, dangerous life of pioneering in an untamed land. Such men and women are made of sterner stuff. There was, however, nowhere else to go to escape the oppression of men; it had followed them across the ocean. It was only through the brief barrier of distance that these people had sampled something of which they were not easily willing to let go. The spirit of revolution was quickly inflamed in their hearts.

Religiously, a people who had been sharply divided, now became united against a common enemy, and in July 1776, they declared their sovereign independence. The vulgar price of this majestic cause, for which men, women, and children would lose their homes, loved ones, and too often their lives, seemed to them to be worth the cost. They viewed the cause for which they fought as greater than their individual wants or needs, greater than themselves, greater than any other personal possession, a greater inheritance to leave their children. The cause was freedom.

Today we memorialize that fourth day of July, and we celebrate the heroism of those who paid the price with their own blood. We lift up their memory because they wanted nothing more than the ability to exercise certain "unalienable rights", including, but not limited to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What many of us seem to forget or perhaps take for granted is that those rights are not ours because the government or the majority vote somehow gave them to us; neither was it achieved by a force of arms. Rather, the United States Constitution only recognized those rights, and that those rights came from a higher power

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