Prayer Tip--250 Years Later

I used to teach the Declaration of Independence every year, out loud, because I am the kind of person who thinks primary source documents deserve a dramatic reading. My students found this deeply embarrassing. I did not care. I still think it might be one of the most beautifully constructed pieces of writing in the English language, which is a strange thing to feel strongly about, but here we are.

One summer, the U.S. government paid me actual money to travel around the country studying our nation’s founding, on the condition that I write lesson plans good enough to live forever in the Library of Congress. That felt less like a job and more like being handed a permission slip to become obsessed with something. I took it. I spent five summers like this. It rearranged something in me, both as a teacher and as a person who now cries a little at the National Archives, which, again, embarrassing.

So here I am, the Sunday right after this country turns 250 years old, and I would love to report that I feel one clean thing. Pride, maybe, tied up with a bow. Instead, I feel that low static you get when you love something and are also worried about it. Which is a strange sensation to sit with in church, of all places, on a weekend built for flags and sparklers.

Here’s my actual problem. I can’t tell anymore, in certain rooms, whether people are worshiping God or worshiping the idea of America and calling it the same thing. I don’t say that to be dramatic. I say it because it’s the thing keeping me up, and because I refuse to pretend I have it figured out just because it’s an inconvenient week to admit that.

I’ve been sitting with a story instead, because that’s usually where I end up when I can’t think my way to an answer. In Jeremiah 29, Israel gets hauled off to Babylon, uprooted from everything familiar, from the temple and the land and their whole sense of who they were, and God’s instructions are almost aggressively unglamorous. Build houses. Plant gardens. Eat what you grow. Seek the good of this city that is absolutely not your home, because if it does well, so will you. No fight, no boycott, no righteous exit. Just plant something. In soil you didn’t choose. For people who didn’t earn it.

I find this both comforting and a little annoying, if I’m honest, because I wanted a better answer than “garden away.”

But maybe that’s the whole assignment. Not resolving whether I’m proud or worried this weekend. Just loving the actual dirt I’m standing on, the actual neighbors next to me, without needing this country to be my forever home in order to take care of it well. Hebrews talks about people who spent their entire lives looking for a country they never got to see, who called themselves strangers here the whole time, and somehow that homesickness wasn’t a failure of their faith. It was the proof of it. God wasn’t embarrassed to be their God because they kept wanting something better.

I don’t know how to wrap this up with a bow, so I’m not going to. I invite you to join me, if you will, in loving this country without needing it to be perfect. Plant something good today in the dirt you’ve actually been given. And let your homesickness for something better be proof of your faith, not a failure of it.