The story is told of a major company that was looking for a new Marketing Director.  After much advertising and many applications, three candidates entered the final selection process.

The first one in for the final interview was asked a simple question: “What is 2+2?” He was surprised, thought about it for a bit, wondered if it might be a trick question and then simply answered “4”. The Managing Director looked at the Board, shook his head and thanked him for coming, but he wasn’t the candidate they were looking for.

The next one in was again asked this simple question: “What is 2+2?” He paused, thought about it for a bit and then replied that statistically it was a number between 3 and 5. The Managing Director smiled and the Board was quite impressed. The candidate was thanked and ushered out.

The last candidate was also asked the simple question: "What is 2+2?" Without batting an eyelid he replied: “What do you want it to be?” And he was hired on the spot.

Daniel grew up in a protected environment. He lived in a religious and cultural cocoon.  But then , “ In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim, King of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar King of Babylon, came to Jerusalem and besieged it” ( Daniel 1:1 )

Daniel and his friends graduated all right , but they marched :
-  With leg chains instead of cap and gown.
-  On a dusty road to captivity instead of on a wooden floor to graduation.
-  To receive imprisonment rather than a diploma.

What had been a cozy cocoon in a homogenous environment became for Daniel and his friends a pluralistic world where even their names were changed to identify them with heathen gods.

Their protected environment of restricted religious choices became a religiously pluralistic world that offered them a potluck of choices. Their religious school was exchanged for the secular world!

Joshua 23:1-13

“When in the course of Human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
 
Signed on July 2 and adopted in the Congress on July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence set free the 13 colonies of America from its rule by Great Britain.
Richard Stockton, a Quaker from New Jersey, was one of the 56 signers of that declaration.  Stockton, in 1758, helped to construct the Quaker Meeting house near his home.  Stockton was a prominent lawyer and landowner until the day that he signed that declaration.  The English army routed him and his family from their home, and he was imprisoned as a traitor to the crown.  As a result of his harsh treatment, his health was broken.  After his imprisonment he returned to the burned and sacked remnants of his home and died there four years later at the age of 51.  His is only one of the stories of these 56 men- many others tell the same story of men who gave their life for freedom.