If they live
Righteously."
-"Book of Mormon Stories" (emphasis added)
We're hearing that word a lot about the United States of America today, being Independence Day. And rightly we should! We should be very proud of her today, on her 240th birthday.
Nevertheless, I have observed that not everyone out there is exactly proud of this country. Have you found that the people who complain about things here in this country are, with few exceptions, largely those who have never traveled outside of its borders? I have. Thanks to social media expanding all of our scopes of view, we're often hearing that we're (collectively) racist, evil, and that people who don't have the rights they should are still lacking those rights.
Granted, we have a handful of people in our country who are making a bad name for the rest of us out there. There are also secret combinations, just as the Book of Mormon warned us about, in the government, the media, and other places. But honestly I shudder when we're called these horrible names as a whole.
Meanwhile, much of the rest of the world faces terrorism on a daily basis, isn't free to speak its mind or to worship according to the dictates of its own conscience, and faces real, dangerous, largely unchecked bigotry in the form of women who are not allowed to sneeze without a man present and homosexuals and Christians both who are jailed, thrown off of rooftops, or are put to death in other horrific ways.
It's a nutty world out there, and you only have to look on the daily newscast to see just how insane things are.
Having traveled to a number of foreign countries and having lived in another for years myself, I am very grateful for just how good we really do have things here. During my time in Peru, I was first shocked to observe people call out racially charged things in my direction as I walked down the street each day, and then I just got used to it. And like my previous statement about the few giving a bad name to the whole, this was certainly the case; though I don't know of a single place here in my home state of Utah where you will walk down the streets in fear of a similar thing happening.
Just look around you. Where some see prison cells, I see freedom and liberty.
But can freedom be too much freedom?
Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, in a speech last week on religious freedom, taught:
"We are in the middle of a rights revolution. Sometimes the alleged new rights are important to correct injustices. But sometimes these supposed rights are little more than demands that government forces others to conform to society's new moral preferences."
To follow up on my previous post, another of the many reasons I preach the restored gospel of Christ, as revealed by living prophets and Apostles, is because possession of this land comes with a promise contingent on our behavior:
"This is a choice land, and whatsoever nation shall possess it shall be free from bondage, and from captivity, and from all other nations under heaven, if they will but serve the God of the land, who is Jesus Christ, who hath been manifested by the things which we have written" (Ether 2:12; emphasis added).
We can see what happened to the Jaredites and Nephites who broke this covenant. What will happen to us?
Let us never take our freedom for granted by always striving to choose the right. Ultimately, we cannot have our rights without righteousness.
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