On the cusp of the new year, I look around and cannot help but despair over what the year has done to us as people. In my heart, I know it is not just the last year. Despite what the enlightened products of universities have told us for the last century, the change in the people of America I cannot speak for other places) is not one of progress toward an improved or evolved humanity.
Life outside the Garden was never meant to be easy. It is, by design, supposed to be a struggle—a struggle whose goal is to define who we are. To grapple with life is an individual struggle, not a group activity. Yes, we gather to form communities, but the character of those communities reflects the individuals within. If the majority of individuals prize courage, freedom, peace, or safety, the community will also.
I challenge you to look around you. Are you judgmental enough to form an opinion of what you see? I doubt it, we have been taught that is evil. Opinions are bad if they don’t fit in with those of our neighbors and must be banished from our minds.
But what of those who dare? What do you see?
I’m a judgmental so-and-so. I admit it. I have opinions on everything. I am not above being wrong or changing my opinion, but my judgments are for me alone, to drive my life as I wish to define it.
It makes me sad to look around and see people too unwilling, too lazy, and too indifferent to be bothered with the uncertainties of life. People who have handed the administration of their lives over to government experts to spell out the rules for them in exchange for peace and safety. People, like water, seeking the path of least resistance.
Life and liberty are the design of God, freely given, but costly to maintain. You must create light; you need to do nothing to have darkness. Life is fraught with battles some physical, some emotional, and some spiritual. I submit, we no longer know how to fight the war for our own life and liberty.
I am a student of the War Between the States. It was a total war unlike the post-WWII conflicts of civilized slaughter fought with rules of engagement and no real goal in mind but the spending of fortunes and the shedding of blood. Total war is waged unto one side no longer has the capability to fight—note, not the will to fight—the capability to fight.
America and Americans no longer fight that way. Some may call it evolution, but I see it as the opposite. A modern willingness to sacrifice life, liberty, and goals for nothing but self-delusion that we have won something of value in being lorded over by our caretakers-masters.
Life is a battle, learn to fight.
Maranatha
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