Standard of Liberty

For God,Religion,Family,Freedom



A Christmas Message
from Standard of Liberty
December 2006

In our spare time over the last year and a half, Steve and I have been learning, gathering, and sharing information we hope is helpful about today’s controversial social conditions. The encouraging words and financial contributions we’ve received have been much appreciated. Thank you all. Here at Christmastime we thought we’d share a little bit about some of the deeper lessons we’ve learned, and continue to learn.

Maybe I can illustrate by referring to the lives of two great writers, John Milton and Jonathan Swift. John Milton, the gifted and widely educated 17th century Christian poet (Paradise Lost), came to realize – through his failed long-term efforts at reforming church and government and his gradually debilitating blindness – that he had his own temptations to fight. Those temptations were to complain and blame God, and to act out of impatience with God’s plan. In other words, with all his great knowledge, talent, and noble intentions, in the end he had to learn to be humble and trust in the Lord. The last line of his famous sonnet that reads: “They also serve who only stand and wait,” must have cost him dearly.

On the other hand we have Jonathan Swift, the brilliant 18th century satirist who also felt a calling to expose society’s wickedness and stupidity. He and others like him hoped to deflate “every kind of pretense, hypocrisy, and self-deceiving folly.” He was an “unapologetic champion of excellence and a pitiless mocker of mediocrity.” (I’m quoting from a great new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature by Elizabeth Kantor.) But guess what happens to both Swift’s fictional character Lemuel Gulliver and Swift himself in the end? Their anxiety overwhelms them. Gulliver, unable to reconcile himself to the inevitably flawed human condition (even of his own family), goes mad after he comes home from his famous travels, an ending which turned out to be a sort of sad prophecy of the author’s own life. I think Swift missed what Milton finally caught on to. Yes, life is unfair and people are often all wrong and cause a lot of damage. But getting angry and bitter and impatient only hurts you. Instead, here is a chance to learn humility and improve oneself, the amazing kind of chance we’re here on earth precisely to experience.

Thinking of these men, I’m reminded of Book of Mormon crusaders for goodness and truth who confessed similar struggles. Nephi’s sin was discouragement (2 Nephi 4). Jacob knew the great anxiety he felt for the welfare of the souls of his people could easily cause him to stumble (Jacob 4:18). Alma, who wanted more than anything to preach repentance to every soul with a voice of thunder that there might not be more sorrow on the face of the earth came to the conclusion, “I am a man and do sin in my wish, for I ought to be content with the things which the Lord hath allotted unto me.” (Alma 29)

We have found in our own little project, Standard of Liberty, that it’s easy to get sidetracked by our own complaints, pride, impatience, and anxiety (and even incredulity at what is actually occurring around us) and that we must learn above everything else to trust in and wait on the Lord. It is because of Christ whose birth we celebrate at this time of year that this “reformation of self” in a spiritual sense is possible.

Monsignor Gilbey said it well: “The duty of the Christian is not to leave the world a better place but to leave the world a better man.”

Merry Christmas and God bless us everyone.

-Stephen & Janice Graham

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