Here we are again.
God bless America
Land that I love
Stand beside her
And guide her
Through the night
With a light
From above…
We are supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. We sing that we are, but it is often aspiration more than reality.
And that is a good aspiration.
I see brave people coming forward at a fearsome price to tell the truth — but not everyone wants to hear it. And some do not want the truth told.
I see courts openly willing to revert to a time many of us were less free, as an argument to put forward their agenda. Which the court is not supposed to have, but here we are.
(Sidebar to say if I lied in the face of my interviewers in order to get my job, once they learned that, I would be fired. But I digress.)
The country I believe in is the aspirational one. It’s one that knows it isn’t perfect and that it has often fallen short of its promises – but is ever striving to live up to its own potential. Ever moving, if slowly, if haltingly, toward being a country with liberty and justice for all.
(Deep sigh.)
There are days that it all seems so dark. Fellow Americans who want to say this nation was perfect at and from its founding. But how can we move forward, how can we be better every day, if we insist that there’s no need for it… if we think we’re already perfect? (Hint: we the people are not perfect. Then or today, perfection is not our purview.)
But I know Who is.
And in these days that feel so dark, like we’re entering the blackest night, it is truly prayer:
Stand beside her
And guide her
Through the night
With a light
From above…
Oh Father: Dispel our darkness. Drop the scales from our eyes, and turn us toward the Light of Your Truth. Help us in these dark times to love You as we ought… to love one another as You commanded… and to be one people, under Your sovereign care and sovereign will, who reflect and are confirmed to Your nature ever more day by day. Enable us, that your people could honor your commandment to love one another and our nation could fulfill our oath to one another: liberty and justice for all.
May we who belong to You and call ourselves by Your name represent You well here for the watching world, until such time as You call us home, and then at last we will see perfect mercy, perfect justice and perfect love.
In this nation on our national birthday, and every day, among all the nations and tribes – be glorified.
But help us and empower us until then, to reflect Your perfection, however imperfectly – to be people of mercy, of justice, of love – that Your character would be reflected among your people and in our nation, and Your name would be lifted up. For not all among us who call themselves by Your name are reflecting Your love, Your grace, Your justice, or Your goodness to the world. Help us — who know that hatred and injustice are not Your character, that You lift up the downtrodden, the poor, the weak, the broken — help us who know this of You to stand, so that those who do not yet know You can see the difference among us.
God, bless America.
Amen.
aka gringita 