Get in the Picture
2nd Cor 3:17
"Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."
With the recent Arizona law aimed at using the police to investigate citizenship, it easy to forget that we are all immigrants. My take is that we have to lessen the complexity of gaining citizenship and also enforce our borders. We have to lower the legitimate wall of immigration and make the illegitimate wall higher.
In our days of rapidly fading prosperity, many Americans would be completely fine with our sealing of the borders against all immigration. We would deny to others what our own descendants were offered: a chance to improve their lives through opportunity. This is wrong. That Americans are now looking to Europe for inspiration, just shows how serious our failure at self-government has become. It is as if we are hopping in the philosophical boat back to our ancestors' former lands.
The American ethos has always been historically one of "can-do." Much of this optimism was grounded in religious faith. As religious faith has declined, our society has likewise declined. There are a lot of reasons for this, the atheistic Left, the Right's proclivity to use religion as a club to beat people with, and much of the great middle of our land who care more about what is on TV than what is in their souls. If we are no longer free, this verse in Corinthians tells us why. It is actually pretty simple: We have forsaken God's ways.
On Memorial Day, I was with a group of people who had come to Valley Forge Park to commemorate the soldiers of the Revolutionary War. Two hundred and thirty-five or so years later, we walked the same steps and paths that they did, under considerably less onerous conditions. We are much more well fed and clothed, but we have lost something that they believed in deeply. Privation must be endured to gain freedom. We would rather have no privation of the body but have starving souls.
There was an Asian couple in the group who had a young daughter of probably eight or nine. As we walked along from statue to statue and heard the Park Ranger give us insight into the encampment at Valley Forge, we had some time to talk. I could tell from the family's accent that the parents were not native born Americans. I thought that they might be visitors from another country. Rather than speculate internally as to their country of origin and citizenship, I just asked.
Turns out that both the mom and dad, probably in their 40's, were both Vietnamese Boat People who had arrived beaten and bedraggled onto our shores in 1980. I could sense that they had a profound sense of the freedom that they had received when they stepped on our shores. At one point the dad wanted to take a picture of both his wife and daughter with the Washington Memorial Chapel behind them in the distance.
Knowing that he would probably not ask, I offered to take the picture, allowing him to be in it. He and his family were very grateful for my small gesture of help. Their daughter, obviously their pride and joy, was also beaming. She, no doubt, was the living hope of her parents' American experience.
As they smiled and I snapped away, the Chapel was the distant motif. Let us never forget that although our Founding Fathers had a profound distrust of putting the state in the hands of religion , they also did not wish to use the hands of the civil authorities to choke religion. For when the Spirit is stifled through both internal inattention and external coercion, freedom is the child that no longer breathes.
"Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."
With the recent Arizona law aimed at using the police to investigate citizenship, it easy to forget that we are all immigrants. My take is that we have to lessen the complexity of gaining citizenship and also enforce our borders. We have to lower the legitimate wall of immigration and make the illegitimate wall higher.
In our days of rapidly fading prosperity, many Americans would be completely fine with our sealing of the borders against all immigration. We would deny to others what our own descendants were offered: a chance to improve their lives through opportunity. This is wrong. That Americans are now looking to Europe for inspiration, just shows how serious our failure at self-government has become. It is as if we are hopping in the philosophical boat back to our ancestors' former lands.
The American ethos has always been historically one of "can-do." Much of this optimism was grounded in religious faith. As religious faith has declined, our society has likewise declined. There are a lot of reasons for this, the atheistic Left, the Right's proclivity to use religion as a club to beat people with, and much of the great middle of our land who care more about what is on TV than what is in their souls. If we are no longer free, this verse in Corinthians tells us why. It is actually pretty simple: We have forsaken God's ways.
On Memorial Day, I was with a group of people who had come to Valley Forge Park to commemorate the soldiers of the Revolutionary War. Two hundred and thirty-five or so years later, we walked the same steps and paths that they did, under considerably less onerous conditions. We are much more well fed and clothed, but we have lost something that they believed in deeply. Privation must be endured to gain freedom. We would rather have no privation of the body but have starving souls.
There was an Asian couple in the group who had a young daughter of probably eight or nine. As we walked along from statue to statue and heard the Park Ranger give us insight into the encampment at Valley Forge, we had some time to talk. I could tell from the family's accent that the parents were not native born Americans. I thought that they might be visitors from another country. Rather than speculate internally as to their country of origin and citizenship, I just asked.
Turns out that both the mom and dad, probably in their 40's, were both Vietnamese Boat People who had arrived beaten and bedraggled onto our shores in 1980. I could sense that they had a profound sense of the freedom that they had received when they stepped on our shores. At one point the dad wanted to take a picture of both his wife and daughter with the Washington Memorial Chapel behind them in the distance.
Knowing that he would probably not ask, I offered to take the picture, allowing him to be in it. He and his family were very grateful for my small gesture of help. Their daughter, obviously their pride and joy, was also beaming. She, no doubt, was the living hope of her parents' American experience.
As they smiled and I snapped away, the Chapel was the distant motif. Let us never forget that although our Founding Fathers had a profound distrust of putting the state in the hands of religion , they also did not wish to use the hands of the civil authorities to choke religion. For when the Spirit is stifled through both internal inattention and external coercion, freedom is the child that no longer breathes.
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