Freedom

Happy July 4th week!  I hope you have a fun time celebrating our country's freedoms with your friends and family.  Our kids have their fireworks ready to go- hopefully they still have a few left to shoot off on the 4th! 

We have it so good here in our country!  I am thankful for all the brave men and women who have fought to give us the freedoms we have.  Andy has three grandpas who fought in wars, two fought in WWII, one in the navy and one in the air corps, and one fought in the navy in Vietnam.  I don't have photos of two of them from back then, but I do have this photo of his grandpa who was a navigator and gunner in the air corps in WWII in Europe.  He's the one in the middle on the bottom row.  Their plane was called the Lady Luck.

I'm sure that seeing the things that they saw in war changed their lives forever.  How could it not?  This grandpa in the photo was shot down once, the other grandpa that fought in WWII in the navy was on the USS New York and watched the Bismarck sink, and the grandpa that was in Vietnam was a commander on a minesweeper and a PT boat.  We see those things in the movies all the time, but to actually watch it in real life, I can't imagine.  We should always be grateful to them and to all who have helped to keep us free.

No, our country is not perfect, things don't go the way we would choose in the government more often than not, it seems.  But is there another country you would rather live in?  I can't think of one!  God has allowed us to live in a time of peace and safety here in our country.  We don't have to worry about violence, civil war, or bombings like so much of the world.  We have so much to be thankful for!