There are lots of gifts our parents give us in our lifetimes. You can start with a home, food, care and expand all the way to toys and all the fun stuff. As you grow older, you see the real things of value your parents gave you. The life lessons, the sense of responsibility. So much more.

The last couple of weeks, I have been doing some rearranging of things in my house and trying to get rid of a few things. In going through stuff, I found several books of my dad’s. I am like him in that he always underlined and made notes in the margins. If you look through just about anything that I have read, you will see the same things. One of the things that I found was a book on the book of Nehemiah in the Bible. Coincidentally, or not, I am actually teaching Nehemiah in our Wednesday night Bible Study. Oh my goodness! What a gift this book has been to me as I read the words and then read my daddy’s thoughts in the margins. I actually went back and retaught a chapter because I had learned so much from what Daddy had written in this book.

Another thing I found was what I am guessing was sermon notes. Daddy’s sermon notes do not look like anyone else’s that I have ever seen. You can’t preach from Daddy’s notes. It is just a series of words or phrases followed by dot dot dot. He knew what he wanted to say and he just put the trigger word down. But the words in this one sermon have just blown me away and stayed on my heart.

It was a sermon about our country and our freedoms and the price that was paid. One line in it said, “We cannot keep enjoying the fruits of liberty, if we do not take time to tend the tree of liberty.” How profound is that! I have searched and searched and I cannot find that quote attributed to anyone else, so I am assuming it to be Daddy’s thought. Jefferson had a quote that was similar in that it said “the tree of liberty must be occasionally watered with the blood of both patriots, and tyrants.”

This statement has just rung so true with me in the days in which we are living. We have enjoyed the fruits of liberty for a long time, and I am afraid we have not been very good at tending to the tree of liberty. If the tree of liberty should fall, there will be no more fruit. Think about that. We are in the middle of an election period. Now more than ever, we need to be voting for those who will tend the tree of liberty, first and foremost, in order that the fruits of liberty will forever be ours.

Another quote that was in these sermon notes said, about the writing of the constitution, “Although they included little that was new, their judgment in borrowing from the past was far better than they could have known.” Again, I am not sure if this was Daddy’s or not. I could not find any citation for it anywhere. But what truth in that statement. “Their judgment in borrowing from the past was far better than they could have known.”

We have to learn from our past. We can’t be busy trying to erase the past. We will not learn from past mistakes if we keep trying to pretend that these uncomfortable times in our past did not exist.

We learn so much from those who have gone before us. Just like I am still learning from my daddy, who has been gone for so many years. Our past has lessons for us to learn. Our future has opportunity if the tree of liberty is tended.

How wise are these words. Learn from our nation’s past. Tend the tree of liberty for our nation’s future. It will make a difference.