A More Perfect Union

The founders understood something we often overlook. They didn’t write “a perfect union.” They wrote a more perfect union — three words that carry more honest weight than any polished declaration of arrival ever could. Read the full opening line of the Constitution and feel the humility in it:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

More perfect. Not finished. Not complete. Not arrived. The very document that governs the most powerful nation in the world begins with a phrase that admits there is still growing left to do.

That is not a flaw in the language. That is the whole point.

Grace works the same way. It doesn’t arrive all at once and declare itself finished. It takes root slowly, grows down before it grows up, and does some of its most important work in seasons that look, from the outside, like nothing is happening at all.

The Long Work of Roots

When an oak tree is young, nearly all of its energy goes underground. What you see above the surface — a thin, unimpressive sapling — tells you almost nothing about what’s actually happening. The roots are reaching into harder and harder soil, finding cracks, going around stone, pressing deeper in search of what they need. It’s slow. It’s invisible. And it is absolutely essential. Without that hidden work, the tree will never be able to hold its own when the storms come.

Two hundred fifty years of American history is the story of a nation doing exactly this — reaching into hard soil, pushing around stone, sometimes fracturing under pressure and growing back stronger, sometimes failing and having to begin again. The arc was never straight. The roots grew slowly, through generations of people who chose to stay committed to the vision even when the cost was high.

That is not a comfortable history. But it is a growing one.

The Apostle Peter, who knew a thing or two about being broken and rebuilt, wrote words that sound like they could have been addressed to the nation itself:

“But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” (2 Peter 3:18)

The K.I.S.S. ~ Grow in grace!

Not arrive in grace. Not perform grace. Not achieve grace once and post it on the wall. It’s not for you to proclaim it, but to grow in it — present tense, ongoing, never fully done this side of eternity.

Grace Is Not Softness

It would be easy to read “grow in grace” as an invitation to go easy on yourself — to excuse the gaps, to lower the standard, to look past what needs to change. But that’s not what grace is, and it’s not what it produces.

Grace is the soil that makes growth possible, not the excuse that makes growth optional.

John Adams — who, alongside the joy of what they were building, carried a clear-eyed awareness of its cost — wrote something that reads like a charge to every generation that would come after:

“Let us tenderly and impartially investigate the causes of the evils that afflict our nation, that we may correct what is amiss.”

Tenderly and impartially. That pairing is grace in action. Not cold judgment. Not defensive denial. But the willingness to look honestly at what is wrong, with enough love for the thing you’re examining to want it to be better.

That’s what a more perfect union demands. That’s what growing in grace requires.

It means sitting with the parts of your own story that aren’t finished yet — the places where the roots haven’t reached, where the soil is still hard, where you haven’t grown into who you said you wanted to be. And rather than abandoning the vision or pretending you’ve already arrived, choose to stay in the slow, unglamorous work of becoming who God divinely designed you to be.

What’s Growing Beneath You

Here is the question worth sitting with today, on this Wednesday in the middle of a week built around new beginnings: What is growing in you that no one else can see yet?

The root work you are doing right now — the prayer that feels unanswered, the faithfulness that hasn’t been rewarded, the character being built in a season that looks, from the outside, like nothing is happening — is not wasted time. It’s the most important work. It’s what will hold you upright when the storm finally arrives.

America’s Semiquincentennial (250 years of the Declaration of Independence) is not a finished nation. And neither are you a finished person.

And grace — real grace, the kind that comes from God and not from our own best efforts — is not insulted by that. It is designed for exactly that. It meets us in the incompleteness, takes up residence in the gap between who we are and who we are becoming, and quietly, season after season, doing the deep work of growth.

The firework gets the sky. But the tree gets the years.

And in the end, it is the roots that hold everything together.

“Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.” (Jeremiah 17:7–8)

Grow down before you grow up. Stay in the slow work. Trust the soil.

The bloom is coming — but first, let the roots go deep.

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