Freedom. Tomorrow is Independence Day. Perhaps this year it will mean more to us than fireworks and picnics. Perhaps this year, 2020, we will begin to understand the price so many paid for this nation to be born.

I grew up in Pennsylvania, one of the original 13 colonies. To me, the Revolutionary War is the most intriguing event in our history. I thrived on the stories of patriots, Patrick Henry, John Paul Jones, John and Abigail Adams, Mary Draper, Samuel Adams, Esther DeBerdt Reed, John Hancock.  These were men and women who sacrificed everything to bring about the end of the tyrannical rule of England and allow the colonies to be free to govern themselves.

As children we had to memorize the beginning of the Declaration of Independence. It begins: “When in the course of human events, it become necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the power of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respond to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

The next section is the one we so often hear:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

All people are created equal. Through the years we have struggled with that truth. We have gotten off course as a nation, but we have fought and died to correct the course when needed. The concepts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness have never been easy to understand, nor easy to embrace, still Americans have proudly displayed their quest for them.

This is history. American history. And if you read through the early papers of the great American heroes who founded this country, you will see that they have pulled many of their truths from the Bible, and sought the Hand of their Creator God to fulfill their purpose.

“A thief comes only to steal and to kill and to destroy. I have come so that they may have life and have it in abundance.” [John 10:10]