Is $4.00 Gasoline Good for the US Citizen?

I have a forty-five minute drive to work every day and I get a fair sized slice of Midwest American Pie. Over the past year I've noticed the flavor has rapidly begun to change. The American Dream seems to be going through a paradigm shift in thinking and practice. I've began to think that what we're experiencing now in our country, with high energy and food costs, could actually have a silver lining; it might really turn out to be a good thing!

When we face diversity and consider our plight we tend to look for answers. Survival is the basest and strongest of instincts instilled in us by our Great Creator Yahweh. I believe what we are facing in our present time, particularly as a nation, is survival. But it means that things will not be as they once were.

The American Dream has undergone many shifts direction and methodology over the history of this great experiment called the United States. In the humble beginnings of our country it was simply a quest for freedom of religion and freedom to live and take care of one's self and his family. My focus is not on the founders of our form of government or on those who had a specific agenda with the formation of the US. I have legitimate questions about them and the overall agenda in the American experiment. My focus is on the individual and his family who came to America simply with a dream of having independence and freedom.

Throughout the history of the United States of America the independence and freedom of the masses has been in peril on a number of occasions. I believe it is under assault now more than ever before. When our forefathers first came to this country, men sought to live independently. But with the formation of the federal government the greed and agendas of men in power have slowly eroded the freedoms and the fierce independence of the frontier people. Over the years, as the government has seized more control and we head towards a nanny state, the independence of the citizenry has given way to a bunch of immature babies who expect to be spoon fed all that it needs. Gone is the frontier spirit who uses what Yahweh has provided to make a living for himself. The Kroger Store, the Piggly Wiggly, and Wal-Mart have replaced the family work engine that survived regardless of those things happening around her.

Our nation was made up of men and women who worked hard and made this country great. They raised their children to do the same. Without the help of the government they raised big gardens and raised their own cattle and chickens and all the things needed to sustain life. They didn't go to the mall to get those staples. For the most part the store was the place to go buy refined sugar, white flour and coffee, and those are the things that they didn't need!

Nowadays the store is the place we go to get our sustenance. But does it sustain us or does it result a slow death of pain and lethargic lifestyle that makes the once independent frontiersman into a dependent ward of the state?

The food we get at the store is full of refined sugar and white flour and ingredients that we can't even pronounce and look like ingredients in a pesticide! The fruits and vegetables we buy are hybrids with, at best, questionable nutritional value, that are picked green and ripen in the back of a semi trailer while being transported across the nation to your local food market. Gone are the days when people grew their own food using some of the harvested seeds from the previous year to plant next year's new crop. Gone are the days when men raised their own corn fed cattle and milked their own cows for raw milk with all the good nutrition not "cooked" out of and with no added unknown enzymes. Gone are the days when women churned butter and used natural ingredients to make wholesome nutritious food that sustained life rather than slowly poisoning their family with that which barely resembles food as Yahweh created it.

Man, in his own wisdom, has decided he has a better way and in so doing has tried to improve on Yahweh's creation. The only problem is; you can't improve on perfection! The whole point of Yahweh resting on Sabbath, after He finished His creation, was that He was finished with His perfect work, not that He was tired. And He did not and does not need man to "improve" on His creation! Why would we, in our futile arrogance, think we can improve the work of the One who created the earth, the moon, the stars, and even us? Can the car, created by man, improve itself apart from the man who created it? No! We can't either! The difference is that we are human beings, created with a will to either submit to our Creator or rebel. Unfortunately we have chosen rebellion and the result is a perversion of the complete provision for life that He intended. That is why, the more I observe His Sabbath, on His Day, as He prescribed it, the more I want to go back to the purity and sustenance of His provision. Maybe the things we are experiencing in our country, and in fact the world at large, is being allowed by Him to show us we need to repent and return to Him and live? I think it could.

So, I, like many more around the country are stepping back and taking inventory, looking at where we are, what we have, and how we must move forward to survive what we've become. As a nation we are living longer but our lives are a mess. We're sick and lazy and don't know how to take care of ourselves. Diabetes and heart disease and a variety of cancers, not to mention HIV and other diseases are rampant. A vast majority of Americans are on prescription medication of some sort - many on psychotic witches brew that promise to cast a spell of feelings of well being on those who take them. A new drug is available from pharma and the medical community every time we turn around. We are told that it will make our lives all that it should in one breath and in the next we are warned that it will either kill us or cause us to kill ourselves or our neighbor. I heard, on a TV advertisement, about one particular drug, that one of its side effects could be promiscuity! Now, do you call this an improvement of what He created?

In further scrutiny you can see a country dependent upon the system of government to provide them with life and happiness. But our constitution provided that we could be in the pursuit of life and happiness. We no longer pursue life and happiness we expect it to be granted us by our benevolent government. But it is just a group of men, some of whom mean well and some with varying personal or group agendas. And we have allowed ourselves to become their wards at best and their chattel at worst!

We have been in wars we needn't have been, spurred on by a small group of men in power all over the world who have an agenda that does not abide by the Law of the Creator nor takes into account the health, safety and rights of the populace. We have oil, gasoline, grocery, and other necessities of life at exorbitant prices that further entrap us in a system with no foreseeable way out. In spite of obvious warnings from Yahweh, we seem bent on self destruction. The American Dream, that is really spurious in and of itself, is shaken to its core, and in fact the whole of humanity needs to re-evaluate its existence and methodology of life.

So as I talk to people I'm close to and those I just meet casually I detect a different spirit being born. As I travel the roads around Northeast Indiana I see a different spirit seen in and around the homes of people. Fences are going up and people are once again beginning to raise chickens and cattle. They are planting their own gardens and looking for alternative, and natural resources for energy. Yes! Necessity is the mother of invention. We are looking for that thing which, not only sustain us in the present, but maintains what we've been provided by our Creator for use later on and for our generations to come, should Messiah tarry. Even the Green movement and its ungodly outlooks on life have served a purpose in spite of their anti-god rhetoric. We all are looking at what we've been given and are seeing it as something that we have not been stewards over as we were commanded.

It's a wake up call to America. We need to go back to what was created for man for live by Yahweh. We have been given everything we need for life and godliness in Him. The pursuit of life and happiness is the pursuit of Him and all that He has provided. In seeking His kingdom and His righteousness we will be steward over His creation. We will utilize His gifts and live as He intended. I think, to a degree, that is what the rank and file frontier family embodied at the outset of the foundation of this country. We need to step out in faith in the Creator and move forward according to His Word and really begin to live. We need to get off the couch and out of Wal-Mart and into the great outdoors and experience life and creation as He planned it. Apart from doing this we will not find real life and happiness, on this side of life or in the one to come.