A Once In A lifetime Celebration

(This post has gotten longer than originally planned because I kept finding things I wanted to include.)

Our country has never been perfect as we all are sinful humans. Yet, people from all over the world have dreamed of coming here for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – all given by our Creator God.

We are not a democracy. We are a republic and Benjamin Franklin warned that to remain a republic we need to protect it. Some have described our country as ‘the grand experiment.’ It was something new and it still is something special.

Betty and I are blessed to have been born in the greatest country that has ever existed where we have been free to seek life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Even more important we have the freedom to worship the same Creator God our founding fathers sought as they put their lives, honor, and all they possessed on the line for this freedom. They have our eternal gratitude for what they did for us at a great expense.

I served this country for four years in the Navy and I would do it again. I love this country and it is a gift from God.

A side note. The resolution for Independence was submitted on June 7, 1776 by Richard Henry Lee, one of the signers. He’s a distant relative of Betty and her family on their Lee side.

In 1776, George Washington wrote in his General Orders: “The time is now near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die.”

I ran across the following sharing just a little of the cost for our freedom:

Justice Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze express it this way in their Free Press essay “The heroes of 1776”:

The people waiting to be met in the pages of the Declaration’s history—the signers, soldiers, farmers, fifers, spies, and messengers—still have much to offer us. People like Caesar Rodney who, suffering from cancer, rode 80 miles through the night in a thunderstorm to break a tie vote in the debate over independence. Or Mary K. Goddard, who first printed the Declaration with the names of the signers and boldly added her own, even though the act identified her as a traitor in British eyes. Or Thomas Nelson Jr., commander of Virginia’s militia at the battle of Yorktown who, legend has it, ordered his troops to open fire on his home after learning the British were using it as their headquarters. After the war, and having spent much of his wealth on the patriot cause, Nelson was left with little to his name and was buried in an unmarked grave. Before he passed, some say he was asked if he felt bitter about his fate. He replied, “I would do it all over again.”

Finally, a Corrales, New Mexico tradition. Our friend, Connie, decorates her scarecrows alongside Corrales road.

Have a blessed and safe July 4th. This type of celebration will not come again in our lifetime.