A few years ago there was a short patriotic address delivered on the 4th of July.
The speaker talked about our heritage of freedom, how precious it is, and how jealously we ought to guard it. The people applauded when he was through.
Suddenly as the applause died away, a voice spoke from the crowd: “Why don’t you tell them the whole truth?” Startled, everyone looked around. The words had come from a young man in a tweed jacket with untidy hair and angry eyes. He might have been a college student, a poet, a Peace Corps worker, almost anything.
“Why don’t you tell them that freedom is the most dangerous gift anyone can receive? Why don’t you tell them that it’s a two-edged sword that will destroy us unless we learn how to use it and soon. Why don’t you make them see that we face a greater challenge than our ancestors ever did? They only had to fight for freedom. WE HAVE TO LIVE WITH IT”.
When I was born in 1943 World War II was raging in Europe and the Pacific. By the time I was three or four years old I realized that Catholics and Christians were killing other Catholics and Christians in Europe. Twenty million Catholic/Christians killed one another in World War II. Even as a child I wondered what faith and going to church was all about, as Catholics bombed churches and killed one another.
Adolf Hitler took control of a Catholic/Christian democratic Germany in order to assert the superior Aryan race and make Germany great again. After the war, as a child I saw so many vivid pictures of what he did to the Jews – piles of six million dead bodies and haunting faces of five million Jewish prisoners in the death camps. These images are re-lived in me today as I see starving/malnourished children in Catholic/Christian Haiti where I am trying to do some good.
In 2017 I spent two weeks with the US-China Catholic Association touring parishes, churches, seminaries and schools in China. If I wanted to find out what was going on in the world, I had to clandestinely use a VPN app to see what CNN was reporting. As I did so, I sat in my hotel room afraid that the Chinese police would break into my room and haul me off to jail for doing what was illegal – trying to find the truth. There are 1.4 billion people in China who must live this way.
Another 1.4 billion people live in India which has been heralded as the world’s largest democracy. But since Narendra Modi was elected as Prime Minister in 2014, India has been seen as a “flawed democracy” with a deterioration of political and civil liberties. It seems that Modi is using Hinduism to turn India into an autocracy. I am very familiar with Compassion International. For 48 years this Christian organization has helped over 500,000 children in India and their families lift themselves up from abject poverty. In 2017 Modi shut down US funding of Compassion International. As a result, 147,000 babies and children were turned away and Compassion International had to shut down in India.
You and I and everyone in America have a lot to consider and pray over this 4th of July and hopefully get up and take action. The 4th of July in 2023, 2024 and 2025 may not be days of celebration as this country has known for 246 years. The young man may well have had it right:
“Why don’t you tell them that freedom is the most dangerous gift anyone can receive? Why don’t you tell them that it’s a two-edged sword that will destroy us unless we learn how to use it and soon. Why don’t you make them see that we face a greater challenge than our ancestors ever did? They only had to fight for freedom. WE HAVE TO LIVE WITH IT”.
GOD CAME UP WITH THE ANSWER LONG BEFORE THE DEVIL CAME UP WITH THE PROBLEM!
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