America.
You are the epitome of the human experience. Your history is both tragic and triumphant, painful and beautiful, broken and building. Your struggle fills me with both anguish and hope. Even the idea of you is ambitious, considering the fallibility of the citizens who serve as your building blocks as well as the land that we build upon.
At our best we are a mess with the motivation to be better. We desire to love others while serving self. We are quick to shine the light on our neighbor’s mistakes while carefully and quietly tucking our own sins away underneath the red, white, and blue banners, balloons, and streamers brought out today from that honored space in the hall closet to display in celebration of you.
It is in our nature to finger point and pass the blame. How else can we draw attention away from our own misdeeds long enough to feel valuable and worthwhile? Our heads know better, but our hearts speak and act impulsively in pursuit of preservation and achieving some false sense of success concocted long ago from someone else’s insecurities.
So we walk forward conveniently allocating our desires, dreams, experiences, beliefs, and engagement into an either/or category of our own design. We consider it necessary that we either believe in God or science, either practice patriotism or treason, either love or hate. And anyone who does not align with our own choices must be wrong, because naturally WE are doing this thing right. Right?
This tendency speaks volumes about our immaturity, both as individual people and as a nation. Two hundred forty-five tumultuous and prosperous years is not enough to know as much as we think we do about our identity. The truth is that no amount of years ever will be, especially if we continue to see ourselves and our future through the lens of either/or.
I honor you today and every day, America. As I look at you I see myself – both tragic and triumphant, both pain-filled and beautiful, both broken and building. I look around and I see the same characteristics in every one of my fellow humans, American or not. We are a nation of both/and, as our history always will be.
God does bless you America, and He blesses other nations too. Which is how those of us who profess to know and love Him should want it to be, as we are commanded to love our fellow man (friend or foe), not just our fellow American. The love that He created, so graciously bestows upon us, and charges us to share is where true freedom begins.
Carrie Joy(ful) 