I don’t think government has a role in telling people how to live their lives. Maybe a minister does, maybe your belief in God does, but I don’t think government has a role.

Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States

Here is a short story about a man who fell in love with a country.

My husband, Sam, is from a Slovak minority in the Republic of Serbia, a state formerly within what was Yugoslavia. When he was growing up, President Tito ran a socialist country – communist-lite, one might say. 

The primary occupation was – and remains – farming. After World War II a great deal of property was confiscated from the large population of Germans who had fled the area. Plots of land were distributed to Yugoslavian families according to the number of family members. They sold their grain and corn to the local government-run co-op, which also supplied them with seed and fertilizer. 

So you can see how individual initiative was a challenge in such a system. Fortunately, the borders were open and thousands of Yugoslavians were able to travel into western Europe where jobs at that time were plentiful.

Sam and I met in the early 1970s in West Germany. Fresh out of the army, he had been recruited by a company as a machinist. During those years when we would visit his family in Yugoslavia, I remember seeing many new homes being built. But not as a result of a vibrant economy. It was primarily foreign money brought back home by those working in the West.

We moved to the U.S. in 1977 and Sam began working as an electrician in yet another new country. In 1990, he passed his electrical contractor’s licensing exam on his first try and built a successful business. His heart, though, was for the church, and we pastored for many years here in Santa Rosa, California.

I witnessed firsthand how a person comes to the United States and prospers with hard work, ingenuity, and skill. But that can occur with no emotional connection to place. Not so with my husband. He understood with crystalline clarity that this country is like no other. It has a history like no other. It rewards one’s labor and makes possible a good and prosperous life. All within the protective shadow of our Constitution – a document unequaled in history in setting forth the God-given rights of man.

He not only believed these truths – he lived them. And as the country welcomed him as a naturalized citizen, he took it into his heart. 

I have watched him over the years as the United States increasingly drifts toward socialism. At times he’s outraged. He has lived in that stifling, spirit-sapping, rights-embezzling system. Why would this great and good country allow the ever-encroaching government to permeate our lives? he wonders.

Still, with thankful hearts we’ll celebrate this Independence Day with our precious family. And I will look at him and remember the small boy in a tiny village in northern Yugoslavia who grew up and came to a country where his gifts and abilities, his hard work and generous spirit, flourished in freedom.

And where he gratefully calls himself an American.