Free

Holidays come and go. For so many of us all we really know about them anymore is that we don’t have to go to work on a holiday. We even tend to minimize some holidays by not really referring to them as maybe they should be. For instance, we often call that holiday in early July as simply, the Fourth of July, instead of Independence Day.

We also seem to get more caught up in the traditions of the holiday than the real reason for the holiday. I’m all for traditions, don’t misunderstand me there. I’ll probably spend time with some family that day. I’ll likely enjoy a barbeque on this day as much as the next guy. I’ll probably ooh and ahh at the fireworks in the night sky. But looking back I know I rarely find myself really thinking about the reason for the holiday during the holiday.

Maybe this year I will pause to remember a bit about this place called home, America. Maybe, I’ll remember how hundreds of years ago courageous people determined that freedom from tyranny was worth a fight and their lives. Maybe I’ll remember how those freedoms were considered precious enough to spell out in writing so that a clear direction for this country could be specified for later generations to understand and appreciate. Maybe, I’ll remember how time after time when others have decided our country was an enemy how my fellow countrymen, brave people, stood up to defend our borders, our way of life, our freedoms. Maybe, I’ll even stand in amazement at how we are so free that some of us can live in freedom and still despise it so much that we take that freedom for granted, all the while choking on the fruits that those freedoms provide, a nice job, a nice house, a future, and an opportunity to dissent.

America is not perfect. She is flawed. Still, no other place offers what she offers. There is no other place I would rather be, especially on a hot July 4th.

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."