Recently I drove from my home in Northwest Ohio to Elizabethtown, Kentucky (about an hour south of Louisville) for a speaking engagement. My wife traveled with me as we left of Friday afternoon, spent Friday night with our daughter and her family near West Chester, Ohio, then drove to E-town on Saturday and returned to the Dayton Airport on Sunday (Pat flew to Washington D.C. and I went home). The Sunday morning 3.5 hour drive from Elizabethtown to Dayton was revealing. It was a beautiful sunny day, and we passed hordes of little towns in addition to Louisville, Cincinnati and Dayton during our drive. We also drove by many fast-food restaurants.
During our 207 mile trek we passed many churches. Their steeples pierced the air on this glorious Sunday morning. We left E-town at approximately 9:30am in order to arrive in time for Pat’s 2:30pm flight. We must have driven by nearly 200 churches in that short time, but very few of the parking lots were full. Many of the off-road fast-food establishments were quite busy, however. The contrasting scenes of the plastic restaurants versus the brick, clapboard and stucco churches struck me as symbolic of the issues confronting our nation at this time. My Saturday speech was entitled “Why Liberty? Why Now?” and focused on the absolute necessity of liberty for the health of our faith, our families and our freedom. Yet….our northern drive on that Sunday morning suggested that faith and family were losing their importance for us just as I feared our liberty might be. We have become a nation of people engaged in “trivial pursuits” apparently with little concern about enduring principles or important matters.
Just as our liberties are being eroded by increasing government meddling, our faith may be undermined by our greater reliance on government for many of our basic needs. It is government involvement, too, that has weakened our families by creating a plethora of programs that shift our reliance from family support systems to government bureaucracies. Those lonely steeples that adorned the skyline along Route 65, Route 71 and Route 75 are stark illustrations of how our government and all its noxious side effects have diminished the importance of institutions and beliefs that our ancestors held dear. Our forefathers died for faith, family and freedom, and this generation appears to be willingly complicit in their devaluation. The all-encompassing, all providing, all powerful government has replaced Almighty God, a strong family bond and individual liberty. And many of us have allowed it with nary a whimper.
Faith can be renewed by carefully considering the wonders around us, or it can be jarringly introduced via an epiphany. Family’s importance can be preserved through conscious efforts and continual outreaching and support—freely given—for one another. To reclaim our liberty is more difficult. We must fight for it. We must rescue our freedom from the grasping clutches of a too-powerful government. For me and I suspect for many others, faith and family are integral components for freedom. I believe that I alone could endure the coming serfdom, but I do not want my children and grandchildren to suffer the indignities and repression. My personal faith in a just and merciful Lord moves me to be worthy of His gift and His grace. Liberty is a gift directly from Him in my view, and to ignore its importance in everyone’s life is to deny His Lordship. A support system of some nature, and a burning passion or faith of some sort is vital for preserving, defending or recapturing freedom.
Our new technologies are terrific resources for retrieving data or for instant communication with others all over the globe. The danger is that so much of our personal communication is becoming digitally mediated. We may have thousands of “friends’ but may not recognize them on the street. Our bonds of mutual support become somewhat tenuous because our relationships are momentary and fleeting, and our commitment to one another is probably not so firm. We may share ideals and ideas. We fear the same outcomes and dangers, but we do not KNOW one another. Thus, for our conviction for freedom to thrive we must build stronger ties with our families, our friends….and our digital associates. The floating “zeros and ones” in the ether resemble the lonely spires of the little churches scattered across the landscape. For freedom to prevail we must rebind the bonds that hold us together. For great undertakings to succeed there must be trust….in our leaders, in our fellow laborers and in our purpose. Trust can only be built through knowledge and personal contact.
Time is working against us as we attempt to save our republic. To be victorious we should first restore the foundational elements that we will need if we are successful. We must rebuild our family relationships, renew our commitments of faith and to our Lord, and strengthen our ties with other patriots who are dedicated to our nation’s rebuilding. This task is too difficult to undertaken for small token numbers of passionate people. We need the Lord’s assistance, our families’ blessings and our people’s strength before we can claim victory for future generations. To reach back to the old hymn: “Blest be the ties that bind.”
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