What is your greatest fear?  I want to challenge you to go through what may be a painful experience….but, just for a moment.  Shut your eyes.  Search your heart.  What would your life, your world be like if your greatest fear were to come true.  Would you open your eyes to a world where you were alone? homeless? starving?

One of my greatest fears is the loss of personal freedoms.  The reason, is that personal freedom is at the root of all that is possible.  Without personal freedom you can not grow, you can not change.  Personal freedom means that we choose where we want to live, where we want to worship, what we say and most importantly what we make of ourselves.  This is why I will be forever indebted to our Founding Fathers, for having the foresight to place such emphasis on this, the basis of our Constitution.

Our forefathers took us from the monarchy of King George to freedom.  Others, thousands of miles away, in the name of freedom, took their people from the monarchy of the Czars to the shackles of Communism.   Even though we won the Cold War, because Communism could not withstand it’s own contradictions, there are people who are seeking to take us down the road of communism.  They are sacrificing our freedoms in the name of “social justice”.  This week France has just voted for socialism, even though they were on the road back to freedom.  It was a sad day for them, as it was for us on Sunday, March 20, 2010.

Perhaps today, freedom makes us hollow.  Perhaps, some have even lost site of it’s importance and take these freedoms from granted.  Many, are so naive and so arrogant as to think that our freedoms can not be taken away from us.  Even for those who still believe in them, they have been stripped down to a level of symbolism.  We are willing to abandon our freedoms for the sake of “security”.

Perhaps it is because we don’t understand that these freedoms are not just something that we may enjoy…it is something that we must be accountable to daily.  We may even need to prove ourselves worthy at times, through participation. Even when it is not comfortable for us to do so, even it forces us to take the unbeaten path, even it forces us to go into the unknown.

Be bold.  Go with tremendous knowledge.  Arm yourself with the know-how that it takes to discuss intelligently your beliefs with others.    Go with tremendous conviction.  These qualities will pour out of you, allow others to be touched by your passions.

So, even though it may be presumptuous for me to ask you to do so, because after all, who am I?  What have I done?  What have I accomplished?  Nothing really.  But, in order to be true to myself, I need to step out of my own comfort zone, take the risk of being misunderstood and dare to speak out in truth.