It was Indeed a "Happy 4th of July"!

We had a great time celebrating our freedom as a nation all day yesterday! We started off the day by going to the parade in downtown Woodstock. Um, I love "small town USA"!! We loved being with our friends and watching the kids scoop up candy and wave at the people going by! After the parade, we took our stacks of Chick-fil-a coupons and enjoyed lunch - we had 13 little girls and 1 little guy in our bunch. That's a lot of kiddos!! And they all did super!! After naps, we headed over to the Gralniks. It was a great afternoon and evening talking with friends, listening to kids run in and out and playing together, laughing over Yahtzee, and of course, grilling out! We missed the fireworks because of the rain, so Reagan is hoping her Daddy will set some off tonight!

How grateful I am for our freedom as a nation, but I think hubby said it best on Sunday morning when he was able to encourage the church with this the day before the 4th...

"Tomorrow we will be celebrating our freedom as a nation. And it is a freedom worth celebrating. We are free to be here this morning with nothing to hide and worship God. But what we are celebrating here this morning is even more worthy of celebration. We are free from sin! Christ has paid the price for our sin once and for all. We are not only free today to meet together in this nation, but we are free to come before a Holy God. We are free to commune with him and praise him.

Romans 6:6-14, 22-23 "We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace...But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Let us worship God this morning with the worship and rejoicing that comes from the knowledge that we have been set free!"