Logan Hagoort
Minister at Covenant Presbyterian Church
Editor of Founded in Grace

Can you imagine a world where no one trusted anyone? Imagine going shopping and having to assume that every person is about to steal your money or murder your children. Life would consist of moving from one moment of terror to another. Would it not make for a life of terror and horror? Would it not be like living in an Orwellian world, where you can simply report someone and make them disappear?

Sometimes it feels like this is the exact climate we are in. When you walk in public without a mask, people look at you with suspicion. When you sneeze because of hay fever, people assume you have the bubonic plague. When you don’t have a vaccine certificate, people treat you like the enemy. But even greater than all of this is the way our government treats us. Throughout the last two years, it has become apparent that our “fearless leaders” have assumed that we are completely untrustworthy and incompetent.

According to the COVID response the citizens of New Zealand – who have generally always looked after each other – have been told that they cannot make decisions about work, shopping, life, sickness, and a whole host of other things. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a government that trusted us to make decisions that were logical and smart?

And yet, there is hope in the world. I recently watched the following video of Boris Johnson:

One of the things that struck me was his statement that they will trust their citizens. Why can’t our government act like this? Wouldn’t it be lovely for our government to trust us to use common sense and stop treating us like infants? What does it take for the NZ government to let us live as a free people again?

I remember a pastor saying to me 10 years ago, “The sign of a free and good nation is that its government and lawmakers say, ‘You can do whatever you want, just don’t cross these boundaries’. But the sign of a deadly dictatorship is that they say, ‘You can do whatever we say, regardless of the boundaries’”.

I have often reflected on that statement as I have looked at dictatorships around the world. Now it is time to start bringing that statement home and holding it up to examine our own land. For generations New Zealanders have sung, “God defend our free land”, sometimes it feels like there isn’t a free land for him to defend anymore.

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