Do you feel your parents set down “rule on rule”? Or were they lax when it came to rules? Which would you have preferred? (Serendipity Bible 10th Anniversary Edition, page 995).
Most
law-abiding folk do not focus on the law or carefully attempt to obey it.
In many respects, such folks are the least concerned with law. It
matters not one whit to them in terms of their own personal conduct
if there is a law against robbery. It would only become an issue in
their lives if they were tempted to commit it which they in no way
are. Thus, they feel no restriction, restraint, or
hindrance. They feel totally free and the law in this sense is
irrelevant to how they live their lives for they have been trained
into civility.
I
know of very few rules my parents set. This is not to say they could not have readily formulated and enforced them. Outstripping all other
concerns of my parents was that of my Christian behavior and
character. As long as I shared their concern here there were no laws
there. Thus, they were many times more concerned with my deportment
at school than my scholarship. I was never relegated to my room for
study, but I easily could have suffered restriction had I
disrespected teachers or students. Since I had no will to do so, I
felt remarkably free at home and suffered no sense of imposed
regulation.
In
this light, not everyone should feel that America is a free country,
but only those raised into civility and empathy. It never
concerns me that the callous rail about restrictions in America. In
fact, it would be very telling about the present tenor of America if
they did not.
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