The question worth asking on a birthday this significant is not just how did we get here? It’s three questions, woven together like the strands of a flag: What did we receive? What did it cost? And what do we owe?

What We Received

Let’s start with the gifts, because gratitude is the right place to begin any celebration.

You received the right to say what you believe without disappearing in the night for saying it. You received the freedom to worship — or not worship — according to your own conscience. You received the ability to disagree with your government loudly, publicly, and without fear of a prison cell. You received courts and laws and a system built, however imperfectly, on the idea that no person is above accountability.

You received the ability to build a life. To work, to own, to move, to dream, to fail, and to try again. You received a passport that opens more doors than almost any other document on earth. You received amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties, and a Fourth of July sky that belongs to everyone who calls this place home.

These are not small things. In the long sweep of human history, they are extraordinary things — things that billions of people across centuries and continents have lived and died never experiencing.

Thomas Jefferson, who understood both the glory and the weight of what they were declaring, framed it this way:

“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.”

Unalienable. Not granted by a king. Not loaned by a government. Endowed by a Creator — which means no earthly power has the authority to take them away.

That is the gift. Receive it today with open hands and a full heart.

What It Cost

Gifts of this magnitude do not arrive without a price tag.

The Declaration of Independence was not a document — it was a target. The moment those fifty-six men signed their names, they signed their safety away. They knew it. John Adams wrote to Abigail the day after the vote for independence with a mixture of joy and unflinching sobriety:

“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.”

Toil. Blood. Treasure. He listed them plainly, without flinching, because he was an honest man and he knew the cost was real. And he signed anyway, because the light was worth it.

That cost did not end in 1776. It has been paid, and paid again, by every generation that came after. By the soldiers at Gettysburg and Normandy and Chosin and Fallujah. By the mothers who packed lunches and wrote letters and held everything together while someone they loved was far away and in danger. By the first responders who run toward what everyone else runs from. By the teachers, the volunteers, the quiet faithful who never made headlines but never stopped showing up.

Freedom has a long receipt. It stretches back 250 years, and it is still being added to today.

On a day of celebration, we owe it to all of them to remember that. Not to dampen the joy — the joy is right and good and worth every sparkler and parade and slice of pie. But to let the gratitude run deep enough to include the ones who made today possible.

“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (John 15:13)

That verse was not written about soldiers. But it has been lived out by them — and by parents, and firefighters, and a thousand kinds of ordinary people who chose someone else’s freedom over their own comfort. Pause today, even briefly, and let their sacrifice land on you. They earned the right to be remembered.

The K.I.S.S. ~ Happy Birthday, America!

What We Owe

Here is where the birthday gets serious for a moment — because 250 years is not just an occasion for looking back. It is a summons to look forward.

The founders were remarkably clear-eyed about this. They knew what they were building would only survive if the people who inherited it were willing to tend it. Benjamin Franklin, when asked what kind of government they had produced, reportedly answered with words that have echoed for two and a half centuries:

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

If you can keep it. Four words that turn a gift into a responsibility.

A garden given and then neglected does not stay beautiful. It goes to weeds slowly, almost imperceptibly, until one day you look up and realize that what was once tended and flourishing has become something you no longer recognize. The keeping of it — the daily, unglamorous, often thankless work of tending — is not optional. It is the price of the inheritance.

So what do we owe?

We owe engagement. Showing up, staying informed, participating in the ongoing experiment of self-governance rather than spectating from the sidelines and complaining about the outcome.

We owe each other. A nation is not just a government — it is a people. And a people who have stopped seeing each other as neighbors, as fellow inheritors of the same gift, as human beings made in the image of the same God, cannot hold what was given to them. The care of the republic begins with the care of the person standing next to you.

We owe the next generation. Just as the founders planted for people they would never meet, we are planting right now for children who will stand where we are standing and look back on what we did with what we were given. What will they find? A garden tended or a garden neglected? A nation strengthened or one that coasted on the courage of people long gone?

The Psalmist put it beautifully:

“One generation commends your works to another; they tell of your mighty acts.” (Psalm 145:4)

That passing down — of story, of valor, of faith, of responsibility — is not automatic. It requires intention. It requires people who believe the story is worth telling and the work is worth continuing.

Two Hundred Fifty Years of Bloom

Think about what has been accomplished in 250 years.

A handful of colonies became fifty states stretching from sea to shining sea. A population of three million became a nation of three hundred and thirty million, woven together from every country, culture, and corner of the earth. A fledgling experiment in democracy became the longest-running constitutional republic in history. Men and women born on this soil have fed the world, healed the sick, walked on the moon, and carried a torch of liberty that has lit the way for nations that didn’t yet exist when the Declaration was signed.

None of it was inevitable. All of it was earned.

And all of it — every freedom you will exercise today without a second thought, every right you take for granted because it has always been there, every firework that lights up tonight’s sky — all of it traces back to that hot room in Philadelphia, where a group of imperfect, visionary, deeply human people decided that the idea of freedom was worth more than the safety of silence.

So tonight, when the first firework climbs into the dark and bursts open over your head in a shower of light, let it mean something more than spectacle.

Let it be a spark — the same spark that started all of this. Let it be a root — grown deep through 250 years of sacrifice and faithfulness. Let it be a seed — planted tonight in the hearts of your children, who will carry this forward long after we are gone.

Celebrate loudly. Grieve humbly. Tend faithfully.

This is the garden we were given.

Keep it.

“Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” (Psalm 33:12)

Happy Birthday, America.

Two hundred and fifty years young — and still becoming.

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