Thomas Jefferson wrote the words that would become the spark for a nation:

“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.”

Read that again, slowly. That sentence wasn’t a guarantee. It was a declaration — a statement of what could be, signed by people who had no proof it would come true. They were betting everything on an idea they couldn’t yet see fully formed. John Adams understood exactly what they were risking when he wrote to his wife Abigail:

“I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this Declaration… Yet through all the gloom I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory.”

He saw light through the gloom — not instead of it. That’s the part we tend to forget when we look back at history with the comfort of knowing how it ends. The signers didn’t have that comfort. They had a spark, a sentence, and the courage to act before they knew the outcome.

The Hard Part Isn’t the Idea

Ideas are the easy part. Anyone can have one. The hard part — the part that actually requires something of us — is what happens after the spark catches and before anything blooms.

It’s the in-between. The not-knowing.

Change rarely arrives polished. It starts messy: a decision to leave something familiar, a conversation you’ve been avoiding, a risk that has no guaranteed return. The Declaration of Independence wasn’t drafted by people who had already won the war. It was signed by fifty-six men who, in putting their names to it, were committing treason against the most powerful empire in the world. Benjamin Franklin reportedly summed up the stakes with dark humor at the signing:

“We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

That’s not the language of certainty. That’s the language of people choosing courage in spite of uncertainty — because the alternative, staying silent and unchanged, felt like the greater risk.

The K.I.S.S. ~ Bloom with a bang!

What the Bang Is For

A firework doesn’t bloom quietly. It takes a charge, a controlled explosion, something forceful enough to break the shell before the light can spread across the sky. There’s no version of that process that skips the bang and goes straight to beautiful.

The same is true for us.

The Bible doesn’t shy away from this either. Isaiah speaks of new things breaking forward, often through upheaval rather than around it:

“Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” (Isaiah 43:19)

A way in the wilderness. Rivers in a desert. Those aren’t peaceful images — they’re images of something breaking through hard, resistant ground. Growth, real growth, almost always requires force somewhere along the way: the breaking of a seed casing, the push through soil, the bang before the bloom.

If you are standing at the edge of a change right now — a hard conversation, a new direction, an idea you can’t quite shake but also can’t yet prove — you are standing exactly where Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin once stood. Not at the finish line. At the fuse.

You Don’t Get to Skip the Spark

Two hundred fifty years later, we get to see the bloom. We forget there was ever a bang.

But every freedom we now take for granted began as a sentence someone wasn’t sure would hold. Every right we exercise without a second thought began as a risk someone took with a second thought — and chose to act anyway.

So if you’re holding an idea today that feels too big, too uncertain, too unfinished to act on — light the fuse anyway. You don’t need to see the whole sky lit up before you’re allowed to strike the match. You just need the courage to start, the same way fifty-six men once did, not knowing how the story would end, only knowing it needed to begin.

That’s how a nation was born.

That’s how anything worth becoming usually starts.

“Be present. Be incredible. Be YOU!!!“