Time

Fast away the old year passes, and it’s only 357 days until next Christmas. Where does the time go? Or better yet, what are we going to do with the time before it gets away? We’re at the beginning of a new year with all the promises of a new beginning before us. What are we going to do with it?

John Quincy Adams once wrote, “There is no people on earth so ambitious as the people of America. The reason is because the lowest can aspire as freely as the highest.”

That’s why the son of a dirt poor farmer in the wilderness of Kentucky and Indiana, who learned to read by firelight and never finished school, much less went to college, could rise to become president of the United States. In his book, The Inspirational Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln, Philip Ostergard writes, “While others slept, Abe read all the books he could find; while others fiddled, he gained skill in mathematics; while others wasted time, he attended court in the County Court House, some fifteen miles distant from his home.”

Lincoln never let his poor, uneducated upbringing hold him back. He worked hard at everything and never wasted a moment. He grew strong and sinewy. No one could keep pace with him with an axe, but he was more than just a rail-splitter. Every experience for him was an opportunity to learn, and learn he did. Ostergard concluded that, “He embodied the best traits and spirit that characterize an American.”

Lincoln lived and fulfilled the American Dream. That dream of freedom to rise above your surroundings and the equal playing field to achieve a better life if you are willing to strive for it, as opposed to being stuck in a caste system, or an enslaving dictatorship, or an economy so poor there is no hope, is the desire of the world. For most of the world a desire is all it is, but Americans own the dream. That’s why everybody wants to come to America. It is a land of opportunity.

Unfortunately, there are sinister forces that want to take that opportunity away and replace it with a socialist “Nanny State,” that will make everybody equally poor and control every move everybody makes. They promise a big, benevolent government that will take care of you from the cradle to the grave. You don’t have to do anything. Sadly, and sickly, I might add, a large part of America’s non-thinking citizenry has bought into this nonsense. That’s why we have had the Obama/Reid/Pelosi reign of terror for the last two years.

Our hope now, however, is that when the new Congress is sworn in this week it will not forget the mandate it was given in the last election to overturn this socialist takeover of our country. Politicians being what politicians are, however, the new Republican majority in the House is just as likely to be stalled and buffaloed into business as usual, and go down the road of compromise to more mediocrity and a failure to follow through on the conservative principles that got them elected.

On January 27, 1838, in an address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln compared the United States with the Church, which “the gates of hell shall not prevail against.” America is invincible, he said, as long as it remains true to the principles it was founded upon.

In his first Fourth of July address as president in 1861, Lincoln seemed to question whether or not America was being true to its founding principles. “Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it, our people have already settled – the successful establishing, and the successful administering of it. One still remains – its successful maintenance against a formidable attempt to overthrow it. . . . ”

In his Gettysburg Address he posed the same question: “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

We may well ask ourselves that question today. Is America going to long endure, or are we going to succumb to the godless, socialist threat from the liberal left, and from a president who may not even be eligible for the office?

“Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom,” and if the next year is going to be different than the last, we must not waste our time resting upon the laurels of the recent elections. We must use our time wisely to continue to be eternally vigilant.