Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. The holiday season is busy for all of us, and it is one of the best seasons to see Liberty in action and used in ways that uplift us all. The choices we make as to where we will do our holiday shopping, which charities we will contribute dollars to and what we do with our time seem to all center on the idea that Christmas is for everyone. We reach out to those in need and those who are downtrodden. We want to provide a lift to those with low spirits. We want God to “bless us, everyone.”
The coming New Year has many of us thinking of changes we can make in our lives to make things better. Maybe we look to eating better, getting healthier, helping more charities, mentoring children or any number of other choices. It underscores the goodness in the souls of most of us. I’ve never heard anyone make a resolution to gain weight or to get in more arguments with their neighbor. We seem to feel a keener definition on what a society should look like.
It is at this moment that I once again recall the words written by men who believed their leadership had become so immoral and corrupt that they needed to reset priorities. Those priorities were based on a simple sentence: “…all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
This was a gift from our forefathers. A statement of faith in a higher power that works for good. The Declaration of Independence seeks to give freedom to people living in the United States. It puts the power to find happiness in our hands – not the hands of the government. Nowhere does it state that we should be dependent on the redistribution of other people’s wealth for our own happiness. The founders of our nation believed that a Creator bestowed upon his creation rights that no person, group or government should be able to remove.
That is truly a gift. But like any valuable gift, it needs to be cared for, nurtured and protected, sometimes even with a brave, firm stand against the powers that would seek to damage or destroy your gift.
There is much to be learned from that one small sentence in the Declaration. There is even more understanding of your freedom and liberties to be gained by reading the pages of the U.S. Constitution – a document that is difficult to change without the will of a majority of the people. A document that, over time has come to help shape the responsibilities of citizenship in a country founded on that sentence in our Declaration of Independence.
Consider giving yourself and loved ones a special gift this season. Read the founding documents of our great country. Perhaps even give copies of them to those you celebrate with.
This holiday season, I wish all our readers the joy and understanding of what the aforementioned “Creator” has in store for us all and a new willingness to stand up and fight for it, just as our forefathers did 250 years ago.
