Are we focused on the right things?

So I went to Easter service at a new church yesterday, expecting to hear the same thing we hear every Easter Sunday at church. And, while this is certainly not a blog with which I want to get into religious discussions with, I can tell you that yesterday was not the "same old" church sermon I have heard in the past. Well, in fact it was, but the way in which the pastor framed the Resurrection of Jesus has really made me think quite a lot since.

In this age of instant information and instant gratification, we are bombarded every day with more stimuli than our brains can process effectively. Everything we see and buy and hear and feel must be the newest, shiniest, most technologically advanced gizmo ever created, or seemingly, we lose interest.

But have you ever watched a young child at Christmas? I was thinking back to the Christmas when my daughter was four. She had so many presents that we had to take a break mid morning because there was such an excess she couldn't open them all at one sitting. Later in the day, we finished opening the rest of the gifts, and sat down as a family for Christmas dinner. After dinner our daughter went off to play......but the craziest thing happened.....she did not go play with any of the new toys she had received, she found the biggest box and was in the process of taking that box from a lifeless, boring piece of cardboard and transforming it, plain as it was, into a fortress of sorts. Cushions piled high on one side, a table on the other. The spare set of sheets now being draped over the top and arranged in a way as to make the perfect canopy for what was becoming the best gift of the entire day.....a plain, empty box.

The thought of that Christmas was brought back to life yesterday when the pastor spoke of how we forget that often, the plain old simple things hold the most wonderment. Of course, he was speaking of the Bible. How the Bible is full of some 600+ people who had a personal experience with Jesus after he rose from the dead. How there are things our faith brings us to believe even though they happened so long ago we have no personal proof. How the Apostles all preached the very same things after the Resurrection...He came, He died, He rose from the dead. Not one of us reading this can prove (or disprove) any of it. It is Faith that guides us to believe. Long ago, when I was a substitute teacher, I taught middle school students in the very lowest math class, how to do Algebra. I remember one of the concepts that turned the light on for many of those that initially didn't "get it" was for them to trust and have faith that sometimes, letters could be numbers. Accept it and it will make sense I told them. I fondly remember seeing the esteem and confidence grow as they began to be successful in solving linear equations.

So, how does that apply to a Blog about Conservative thought you may be asking yourself. As I have continued thinking about yesterday's events, and about how the power of the Bible is so great that you can hear the same sermon year after year after year and still be inspired and awed by the power of it. We can apply a similar thought towards the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We don't need to write new laws and pass fancy entitlement programs. We need to hold a sense of wonderment and awe for the Founding Fathers and how they could be so thoughtful as to write documents 200+ years ago that, today, if we were to live and operate government by the creed that:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Further, if we all lived by these words and if our government and elected officials governed by, for and of the people, that we would once again reinforce the reality that these United States of America are indeed the best that humankind has ever offered. If we truly believe that all men are created equal, than there would be no need for special programs that politicians create. You see, our focus away from the plain old stuff, and into the shiny new WOW stuff, has pushed us further and further away from the true greatness of America.

America is not great because the programs of the "Great Society" have uplifted the poor and disenfranchised. In fact, those government programs have done more hard than good because they keep good people down by leading them to believe the government will take care of them. Our government is in the mode of self-fulfilling prophecy. The poor and disadvantaged vote for those who say "Hope and Change" when in fact, until you have Faith in yourself and in God to rise above you will be kept down by programs and a government that tells you they will take care of you.

Please join me in urging your local, state and national elected officials to do as the Founding Fathers intended. Create all men equal. All men are entitled to life, liberty and their own pursuit of happiness. That government can't tell us how to live of our lives. The government can't determine what our pursuit of happiness can or can not be. We must reduce government, eliminate it from the daily lives of citizens. Government CAN NOT make your life better, but through faith in God and faith in self, any person, willing to put in the hard work it takes, can make life better, and can pursue happiness beyond the parameters of our current government.