It’s the Fourth of July and fireworks have been going off outside for the better part of two hours now. I love fireworks, and I also always think about how many veterans might be struggling tonight after serving and fighting for the freedom the rest of us are celebrating. It’s a strange and hard thing, the way freedom here cost so much at its inception and how it continues to cost more and more today.

I love seeing everyone’s patriotism on a day like today–so much red, white and blue in pictures everywhere, picnics and parties with family and friends and every possible and celebratory dessert creation you can imagine. The way we honor this holiday as a nation feels fully American and really wholesome, which is probably my favorite part about it. Somehow we do feel a bit more united on the 4th, whether or not the headlines tell a different story tomorrow or the next day or the next.

We’ve all be through such a tumultuous year and a half, and from so many different angles. Political unrest, politics in general, pandemic fears and realities, isolation, trauma for reasons not even related to a global pandemic but rather on top of it, relational challenges, racial tensions, job insecurities, remote learning and working and all the things, major needs for adaptation, completely new territory on a global scale…all of this taking its emotional, mental, physical, spiritual toll on every one of us, no matter how uniquely. To celebrate Independence Day today looks so much like it did before last year’s more subdued, more isolated version, but it feels different to me. It feels weightier. The price tag on freedom has changed, and so have we.

I don’t really want to get super philosophical here or anything wild at 11pm on a holiday, but I do just feel like sharing that this year’s 4th stirs up new things in me. I am amazed at how normal things feel (dare I say, are?) and yet how much I want to acknowledge the treacherous path we’ve all been on to get here. I think a lot of our freedoms were challenged this past year+, and I still think they’re being challenged today. My personal quest for understanding and truth have ebbed and flowed in the midst of it all–sometimes my personality has driven me to pursue information to a fault, and more often than not (and especially as time has gone on), I’ve needed to hang my hat on what my belief in Christ leads me to recognize as Truth alone. I’ve needed to block out the droning on of information and noise from every side, instead pressing in to the ONE place I can really count on to be life-giving and hopeful and truly freeing.

Freedom looks different to me this holiday because I think we’re all a little more seasoned; perhaps a little more skeptical or frustrated or curious about what’s true and what’s been true and whatever comes next. I’m still so grateful to live where we live and to belong to a nation that has pursued freedom creatively and innovatively for as long as it’s been a nation. And like many (or most?), I’m still grappling with the cost of freedom and wondering about the future of freedom, which seems to change more readily these days than any of us might like to admit. It’s good to be here, planted and hopeful for the future, and it’s also good to come to the end of this celebratory day acknowledging where our true freedom originates. I can picnic, set off fireworks and dress in red, white and blue to authentically represent my patriotism, and at the same time, I’m leaning hard on God for His guidance for the future of our nation and His protections over the freedoms we’ve come to know and enjoy simply by living here.

Here’s to true freedom–the kind that can never be take away, and to our day to day freedoms that have been hard fought and hard earned. May we never take them for granted!

MM