Thanksgiving is one of the happiest celebrations in our nation. With bounty and abundance, we celebrate our blessings; but the underpinnings of our joyous day is freedom.

That illusive gift moved the Pilgrims to sacrifice for the right to choose in life and be protected in the differences of their choices. Today freedom will taste like turkey and pumpkin pie, and tomorrow like Michael Kor and Vera Wang creations.

And we are criticized for this world-wide, hated in some places. We are called shallow, ignorant, imperialistic, and materialistic. And some maybe are those things.

Still there is a lightness of heart and enjoyment and pleasure that springs up in life because we are free. This is hard to understand unless you are free! Many nations, especially those straining under totalitarian and evil governments, cannot grasp this. The joys of liberty run so deep that we act differently and are seen differently by the world. In reality, freedom changes us and marks us. And in the hands of the user, it can be a tool for blessing or cursing. It can be multiplied or wasted.

The lightness of heart we carry does not give us the right to be cavalier about freedom.

Let us  be sober in heart always and never wander from the price of liberty that once tasted like rolling, salty ocean waves and 51 dead the first year when our forefathers’ first settled in the New World.

Even today for some, freedom will taste like sacrifice to the point of death as our soldiers fight for liberty. What other nation loves freedom so much that they send their young to foreign places to defend its glory?

Today I remember the roughed, raw price of freedom and pause in reverence to give thanks.

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. ~ Galatians 5:1