I’ve always believed that Satan and his minions work hardest on Sunday mornings. How many of you can recount horror stories about trying to get everyone in the family ready for church, and arriving there completely flustered and unprepared to worship? It made you long for the days when you got up late on Sunday morning, had breakfast in your bathrobe and read the Sunday paper while classical music played in the background – OK, so that was our routine before I came back to the Lord after a 12-year hiatus, and brought my wife and children with me.

So I approach Sunday mornings fully aware that Satan doesn’t want me to go to church, and even if I get that far, he certainly doesn’t want me to worship and plunge headfirst into the presence of the living God. That’s why when a message from a Facebook friend landed in my private mailbox, with a shared post from “Being Liberal” that began, “Some humor to start your Sunday morning…”, and his comment “Kinda have a point there?”, I knew Satan was trying to get under my skin.

I responded to my friend’s message with a lengthy reply, but I mistakenly clicked on a status update that flashed on my screen, and I lost everything I had written! You are crafty, Lucifer, but I don’t give up so easily. I’m going to church with an anticipatory mind and heart, and, when I return, we will have words!

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A couple of days into the power outage that we’ve been enduring here in Lynchburg, a friend told me that God uses everything to impart a lesson, and that there is a lesson in our predicament. While I agreed with him in principle, I wasn’t in a learning frame of mind at the moment!

As the outage has dragged on, however, and with my family away for the duration in the comfortable air-conditioned homes of friends in Calvert County, Maryland, I’ve had a lot of time to myself for observation and reflection.

This Independence Day is the first one I can recall spending without the happy distractions of family, friends, food and fireworks, so I hope my thoughts on what this day means to us in the second decade of the 21st century aren’t being overly influenced by my melancholy mood.

I don’t think they are, because they reflect a sentiment I’ve expressed for several months now which some have called fatalistic, but which I prefer to think of as realistic and preparative with the objective of preserving the essence of our republic in some form or fashion.

Let me set the stage with a question.

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