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America awakens

By Rev. Dr. Knox Herndon

I have tried to be a “people lover” all my life. Our family were mostly extraverts and real people lovers. In fact, if you overlay these types of personalities with Christianity you get an interesting mix. I say all this to emphasize how in love I am with this new “awakened America.”

I have traveled the world several times and lived approximately one third of my life overseas. What this does is gives one an interesting world view of America and how she is perceived around the world. I remember the phrase, “When America sneezes, the world gets a cold.” I still believe this to be true. Any country who is being oppressed can, and often does, look to America for help, and often gets it in some form. The Berlin Airlift and the struggle for democracy in Iraq are perfect examples of that.

What often really gets my goat (I’ve never really understood that statement but know what it means) is to hear someone in their air-conditioned splendor, swirling in every opportunity and freedom imaginable here in the United States, say, “Why should we be fighting in Iraq?” I say to them, let them be under a dictator and lose all their freedoms and then listen to them scream for the armies of the free world to free them.

It wasn’t too long ago that we were under a “taxation without representation” situation under an oppressive British government and wanting with all our hearts to be free of this oppression, and we fought a very bloody and costly war for our independence.

I always learned that when God has been good to you and your country, it is only right to give back the goodness that has been bestowed upon you. As I was younger and in college, I have had some very good friends and family members that loved me and helped me get through school and life itself. Without them, who knows what or who I would have become, but with their help I made the goals that I chose. Is it not the same with nations? My Bible tells me, “To whom much is given, much is required!” If the greatest nation and the most powerful ceases to help the weaker nations to get their freedoms, then why are we the greatest? Is it to just have a wonderfully rich society and buy another condo on the beach and another SUV and to ensure that everyone is a millionaire? I feel this is very shallow and selfish.

Why people hate President Bush is because their selfishness, self centeredness, and greed. It is not about being a Democrat or a Republican. This is about seeing beyond self and seriously being a lover of humankind. Because if you truly are a lover of people, you will want them to be free. These are godly ideas and why the world hates President Bush. This is predicted over and over in the scriptures that the “world will hate you as it hated me.” If you don’t believe this to be true, then just try it some time to live a true Christian life and see the automatic, without provocation, attacks you will receive. Think for a minute at the trial of Jesus and listen to the recorded false accusations that were thrown at him. All he did was heal the sick, raise the dead, feed the masses, claim His divinity, and offer eternal life. In my estimation, not much here to hate, but hate they did, and crucifixion followed.

As a people lover I truly thank God from the bottom of my heart for the man who is sitting now in the White House. He is a man who takes his Christianity with him into politics as a compassionate conservative. He is unselfish and when asked in his first run for President who the most influential person in his life was, answered with the politically incorrect response “Jesus Christ.” This one name alone could have cost him the election, but look what followed. God is not mocked and never will be.

In closing this little epistle, I want to thank the silent majority for waking up and doing what should have been done a long time ago. Our new motto should be “silent no more!”

As they say in the South, “You did good, America!”