Faith and freedom

July 4 marks the anniversary of the Declaration of American Independence. Two hundred and twenty years ago, 13 little American colonies made the perilous decision to wage war with the world's strongest superpower. As we all know, July 4 does not celebrate a victory, but only an attempt. It marks the beginning of a seven year, uphill struggle, a war which many thought impossible to win.

The nay-sayers would have been proven right in short order were it not for one small factor in the equation: the faith factor. Without this, there could have been no hope of winning on such an uneven playing field. But they were not playing games in America in the year 1776. The stakes were extremely high: they pledged their "lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor".

And for what? For another intangible called freedom: independence from a "government" more interested in what it could gain from its subjects that it could give, more interested in ruling its empire than serving it. Bad governments like that still need to be opposed today. From that time until today, many, many other countries followed those American patriots' example, Those who have won have also shared their love for freedom, good government, and faith to believe that God would aid the cause of such worthy goals.

Faith, it has been said, is: the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not yet seen. Rather than focus on the might of the British Empire, they chose to focus on something, or someone, even bigger and more powerful, and with that faith, they could attempt the seemingly impossible. They couldn't look into the future and see the victory at Yorktown five years later. At the time they could only look around them and see their own smallness, weakness, inability to even work well together, and lack of sufficient finances to win. But what they lacked physically, they made up for spiritually: the quality and quantity of their faith was their secret weapon and only hope of success.

It worked for them then, and for Indonesia in 1945, and will again for us, and any people in any time who have the faith to do it.

DAN ADAMS

Jakarta