Freedom…sometimes it felt like an illusion. One for which
men like Percy were willing to risk a flogging, one for which men like Father
were willing to leave their family.

She hadn’t understood that then, when Mother had first
fallen ill and she had just wanted Father there, beside her, making it all
well. She had resented his cause, his conviction, his duty to country above
kin.

But his words had burned into her mind as they were consumed
in the flames, haunting her as she sat by her mother’s deathbed, as she waited
for the arrival of the grandparents she had never met. As they brought her
here, forced their wills upon her, and made her wonder if she would ever again
be free to live how she wanted.

That was when she realized freedom and faith were so
inexplicably linked. The Lord had granted mankind an amazing gift when He
allowed them to choose for themselves how they would live. He had surpassed even
that when He freely offered forgiveness for choosing wrongly.

How could they who loved Him and His precepts not want to
extend that right of freedom to everyone? To their children and their
neighbors?

                                                                        ~ Ring of Secrets

While writing Whispers from the Shadows, I was so inspired to see how, toward the end of the War of 1812, the people who had been neglectful and unconcerned during much of the war finally roused from their stupor and banded together…and won the day.

I saw so much of our world today in that world I studied from 200 years ago! How the people turned a blind eye to the danger marching toward them, until it was so near they could deny it no longer. But then, oh the lessons I learned in what determined people can achieve! In August of 1814, the city of Baltimore put aside all daily life. Every man, slave or free, put shoulder to shovel to prepare the city for the arrival of the British. Differences were put aside, causes were united. For those weeks, they saw what was really important, they remembered what their parents had fought for: the freedom to live on their own terms, to make their own laws.

And then in the third book I just finished, I entered the Civil War. Freedom took on whole new meaning then, didn’t it? At one point, a secondary character questions my heroine on whether she had prayed for freedom from the bonds of the sins she’d been forgiven for. My heroine answers that it is too loaded a word for her to have tossed about so casually.

But I’d been thinking about it. Largely because at inauguration time (in the present that is, LOL), we were flipping past MSNBC one night and caught a few minutes of one of the commentators ranting about how unfair it is to expect President Obama to be sworn in with his hand on a Bible. The Bible, this guy said, did not once condemn slavery, the institution that had held African Americans against their will for centuries. He had checked! he said. Not once did it condemn it.

He’s right–it doesn’t. And in considering why, I realized something. God doesn’t often tell us how society as a whole should behave. He set out His Law, but if a nation doesn’t obey it…what then?

That’s what most of the Bible is about. It’s about the what then. It’s about how we, as those who follow Him, should behave in whatever society we belong to. It’s about us. Individuals. People. Not nations, not societies, not cultures. Us. God, in His amazing compassion, knew that while physical freedom was something everyone yearned for, the really important thing was freedom of the soul.

Freedom from sin. That’s where hope lies. That’s where Joy resides. That’s were we can find our rest.

I started reading Genesis again the other day, and you know what struck me? That bit about God saying that if Adam ate of the forbidden fruit “surely in that day you shall die.” That day. That makes critics yell, doesn’t it?

But it’s true. Adam did die that day. Because he sinned. He was separated from God. And that is the true death. But forgiveness…that frees us from sin. Frees us from those terrible consequences.

I’m proud to be an American. I’m prouder still to be a Christian. And I’ll wave my flag today knowing that those who were willing to risk it all to make this country independent understood that in ways I’m still discovering.

My question to you today: