What’s a happiness spoiler for you? I’d like to invite you to delve into this topic a bit deeper with the story below.

HAPPY FOURTH
An exchange student who fought to keep his country from turning into a communist regime asked a professor, “Do you know how to catch wild pigs?” Then he explained:
You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come every day to eat the free corn. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence. They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in the last side.The pigs, which are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat that free corn again. Then you slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd. Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but to no avail. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity. The young man told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening in America.

What’s wrong with enjoying the food for we all eventually die. But what a way to live and die. Is this what you want? Is there no way out? Apparently, happiness needs an environment of freedom. No wonder, our brave freedom fighters go to war if there is no other way. But there are other arenas, some more personal, where we fight to guard the freedom we already have.

To stay on course, let’s keep in mind a few things. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and evil exists along side the good. What is free is not really, what is beneficial may not be, cause they lead you to captivity. In the end, good intention is not enough. There are nice people but who take advantage of others instead of “loving your neighbor as yourself” and justify lying with good intentions like promising protection and free stuff from cradle to the grave. It is when we are down and out that we may be tempted to take the easier way out. And now that we are hit with one of the worst inflation, the more we have to watch who we trust. Can’t simply follow the crowd or that free stuff. It might be a timely reminder to say that Hitler used inflation as the single issue that brought him to absolute power. Will history repeat itself? Yes, if we forget lessons from the past, and allow fear of survival to lull us in to destructive values. Maybe that is why Jesus said, be gentle as a dove but wise as a serpent. It is not enough to be nice, we must be wise. And there are those who refuse to compromise to get ahead.


May we not become a society addicted to freebees? Freebees is addictive. “The instant gratification from dopamine it produces is a rewarding feeling like that produced by drugs. But dopamine also prevent us from learning that the reward is fleeting. It creates a learning resistance at the primal level of the brain as happens in gambling or social media by interfering with reward prediction. It overrides our self-awareness or reflection that a thing is damaging, deceptive or degrading, with an illusion that the reward is ever new and worth pursuing.“

Indeed, nothing is free including happiness. This reminds me of the brothers Jacob and Esau. For a bowl of porridge, elder brother Esau sold his birthright to younger brother Jacob. Many have given up their lives for the freedom we enjoy today. Unfortunately, many are going to make choices out of fear or for instant gratification due to wrong belief, misplaced trust, naive expectation which plunged them into greater losses, moral failures, and spoiled happiness. But it’s not too late to get back if we “seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. Then all these things shall be added unto you.” Matthew 6:33. After all, we do not live by bread alone.
Small Step: So when the world is unkind, do I turn into swine and forget I am made in God’s image? To remember freedom day, what is one thing I can do to celebrate?
