Let Freedom Bling?

I was in the city yesterday, waiting to pick up the Mrs. and sitting outside of Independence Hall. Fitting, eh? Today this historically rich city of Philadelphia will be booming and blasting with fireworks and all shimmery with swirling "glow in the dark" necklaces for kids, and cheesy fries. Lots of cheesy fries. It's gonna be big! Bigger than all of us! It's America's Birthday!

We all like BIG. I think in a positive sense it reminds us that we're small. We discover that we're part of a BIGGER picture; that the World isn't just our little brush stroke of a life in one corner of the painting. We play a part in a big Glorious Canvas and are members of one BIG human family. This puts all of our "little" problems into perspective. Or at least it should.

But when BIG becomes quantifiable in the amount of stuff we gather, rather than qualifiable in the measure of love we receive or give, then we've got problems. This is a BIG deal. The freedom we celebrate today is the freedom to choose one of these paths. A life, family, country, or world will rise and fall, thrive or thwart their destiny if it chooses poorly.

Ah Freedom.... it's the unique and inviolable gift that makes humans human. We can choose. We can move. We can be heroic or demonic - selfless, or selfish. We can be super-human by cooperation and abandonment to the Divine Grace that flows from Jesus, or we can reject Him and hence slip into being sub-human, never "awakening" to our divine potential, our promise of sharing in the divine nature. The mystery of mysteries is that God took this tremendous risk in creating us this way! He knew we could fall. But so that we might RISE... God Himself took the risk of creating us free.

The question on a day like today is, in the words of William Wallace, "What will you do with your freedom?" Amass a bunch of stuff, build a bigger nest? Use our freedom for "bling" or let that freedom ring?

Freedom is not our license to have it all. Freedom is the calling to give it all.

And thank God our ancestors did just that.