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Happy Birthday, America: We're Not Doomed (This Week, Anyway)

This week is America's birthday. 250 years of liberty and the gospel going out. And before getting into the celebration, it's worth admitting the temptation that comes with a week like this: the urge to talk about the judgment America's under, to talk about negotiations going nowhere, to talk about turning our back on allies as we speak. That's the "doomed" version of this week. But it's a birthday. Hello.

Nobody shows up to a birthday party and says, "Hey, you're closer to death, hope you spent the last year well, 'cause you ain't got many left." Nobody hands out a black balloon and says, "It's all downhill from here, aches, pains, surgeries, medications coming your way, but happy birthday." Read the room. That's not what we do at birthdays. And yes, history shows republics like this one generally last about 200 years before people figure out they can vote money out of the treasury for themselves. We've made it 250. Longevity-wise, that's worth something.

There's a lot of negativity going on right now, legitimately. A lot of fear and trepidation. But Jesus said, "Fear not." Jesus said, "Trust me." There's contentment with godliness to be had even while everything's going sideways, including watching our great nation struggle with the basic tenants of freedom. So switching gears, like the news does when it cuts from a decapitated head story straight to "good news for egg lovers," it's time to talk about the goodness.

A Tale of Two World Cup Exits

We don't fully grasp how serious these games are to the national psyche of countries around the world.

• South Korea: The president came out and said he was utterly baffled by the national team's early exit, baffled enough to order a government review of the program and publicly criticize the coach as incapable. The coach, under the weight of the backlash, resigned before he could be terminated outright. An entire country in an uproar, embarrassed, government getting involved, over a soccer exit, not even missing the round of 32, just an early stumble.
• Uruguay: Players had to book their own commercial flights home after the nation's soccer federation reportedly canceled the team's charter flight following a winless World Cup group stage exit. They literally said: you couldn't win a game in your group, we're pulling the flight, book your own way home. That has defection written all over it.

Compare that to the state of the news here, which can be summed up in three words on repeat: Trump's great, Trump's awful, Trump's great, Trump's awful. That's the cycle. But even teetering the way it is, even with all its problems, this is a country with 250 years to look back on with pride, especially as Christians, because of the gospel that went out. And it's not a country that's going to cancel the flight home on its own athletes just because they didn't win.

It calls to mind hockey as a kid. There were dads who took their kids out after a win and sent them straight home after a loss. Did you go out? No, we lost. But it doesn't have to work that way. Win 12-nothing, go out for donuts. Lose 12-nothing, still go out for donuts. Most games were 5-3 anyway. That same instinct carried into raising kids with paper routes: tough mornings getting them up on a Saturday, but there was always a stop at the local bakery once the route was done, win or lose, good morning or bad. Maybe that wasn't a great-father move so much as a deep love of donuts, but either way, the donut never got taken away just because the morning was hard.

Gambling, Addiction, and Who's Paying the Price

There's another story worth pointing to: legislation passing to stop the bullying and stalking of athletes tied to gambling debts. As online sports betting has exploded, the abuse directed at athletes has escalated right alongside it — people tracking players down and making their lives miserable because they missed the shot, threw the interception, or did whatever caused somebody to lose a tremendous amount of money on one of these betting apps.

To be fair, the specific app behind any particular abuse case isn't something to state with certainty — that's just a turn of phrase, not a sourced fact, and it matters to be fair about that kind of thing. But the underlying reality of the legislation is real: some state passed a bill to stop bullying and stalking of athletes rooted in gambling debts.

Some people treat it like a glorified office pool, just bigger. Others see it as gambling, plain and simple, and an affront to the Lord Jesus Christ. If there's a betting app sitting on the phone of someone who calls themselves a Christian, that's worth sitting with for a minute.

Gambling has addictive properties. That's just reality. As a culture leans further into it, those addictive tendencies and the reactions to them are going to play out — not for everyone, but for some, and those are the ones worth having real compassion for. There are people, genuinely wonderful people, known personally, who got pulled in and almost lost their family, almost lost their house, almost lost everything because of it. So bravo to the state that recognized the detriment and tried to head it off before more of that happens.

Gramster Rant: What Happened to the Word "Freedom"?

There's a real disconnect happening with the word liberty, and especially with the word freedom, in the minds of the younger generation. Not as a put-down. Just a fact. Many of them haven't been taught to think critically the way people used to. And the honest question worth asking is: do they even understand what freedom actually is?

Here's the issue. Freedom has gotten flattened into something it was never meant to be. It used to mean the ability to choose your own way, to determine your own destination, within a structure of what's good and right and pleasing. The founding fathers — who wanted you blowing stuff up on the 4th of July, trust that — still wrote "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" with liberty doing real work in that sentence. Life is a free life. Liberty is freedom operating inside a moral framework. And the pursuit of happiness only flows out of that liberty. Restrict it, and the pursuit of happiness gets stunted, one way or another.

Somewhere along the way, probably starting around the big dark cultural turn, that got misplaced. It shifted from "you have liberty" into "you have a right to happiness," full stop, no framework attached. And once happiness becomes a right instead of a pursuit inside boundaries, anyone who gets in the way of that happiness becomes the enemy who needs to be punished. That's morphed into a culture where your feelings matter more than the people around you, where you're number one and everybody else can pound sand. That's what life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has slowly turned into.

And it shows up everywhere downstream. When younger people hear "freedom," it's not "acting within a moral framework" anymore. It's "I can do whatever I want and you're not the boss of me." Words have been deconstructed to the point where they don't carry the weight they used to carry.

There's an old rock chorus that captures the deeper problem: you don't know what you got till it's gone. Not exactly deep philosophy as written, but it rings true as a life truth. The people who say money isn't important are the people who have money. The people who say relationships don't matter are the people with great relationships. It's loss that reveals value.

The younger generation doesn't know what it's like to:

• Not have internet
• Have a flat tire and have to wave somebody down, walk a mile to a payphone, drop a dime in (if they're even old enough to know what a dime was for that)
• Not be tracked — every action, word, and piece of data stored, compiled, and scattered across servers somewhere

That's part of why the push to eliminate social media for kids sixteen and under is a genuinely great idea. Junior high kids on social media is heartbreaking to watch. There were enough problems in junior high without it. Nobody gets through junior high unscathed. If you weren't bullied, you were probably the bully, at least sometimes — that's not a knock, it's just how that age works. It's a pack of kids looking for other kids to burn on and hurt, Lord of the Flies in a hallway. When it's your turn, you take the hit, then you jump back in the pile and keep going after other kids. The hard years of growing up were difficult enough without social media handing kids a place to do all of that where no other adult can see it or stop it.

Here's where it lands spiritually: this is exactly why Scripture keeps pushing believers to let go of this life, die with Christ, per Colossians 3, and go all in with the Lord, because that's where real life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is actually found. Not in the unbounded "freedom" the culture's been selling, but in the pursuit of righteousness — because what's found in Christ is worth more than anything this life could possibly offer once it's actually seen for what it is.

Salvaged by God Deep Dive: Liberty vs. Freedom (2 Corinthians 3:17)

"Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." — 2 Corinthians 3:17

That's the NASB rendering, a translation worth digging into more these days, embraced by most scholars and teachers as one of the best, maybe the best, translation available. Plenty of other translations render that last word as "freedom" instead of "liberty," and both are good words, but there's a tweaky little difference between them worth pulling apart.

Freedom is the broader term:

• The ability to choose your own way
• Making your own choices
• Determining your own destination

Liberty is more specific:

• Having the power, or being given the power, to choose what you ought to choose
• Operating within an ethical, moral framework
• A destination that can't be willy-nilly — it has to sit inside a structure of what's good and right and pleasing

The corrective for everything above is going back to what life actually means in Christ. New life in Christ is liberty: the right to find the destination he has, trusting he'll light the path and direct the steps, just as Scripture promises. The pursuit of happiness, rightly understood, is contentment with godliness as great gain, found in the pursuit of righteousness. The deeper you walk with the Lord, the more you realize how sinful you really are, and the more your joy comes from him taking onto himself the wrath you actually deserved. Paul said he didn't want to know anything but Christ crucified, being in Christ. That plays out day to day across 70 or 80 years on this earth, by strength, in the pursuit of righteousness.

There's an old line that fits here: give me liberty, or give me death — Patrick Henry. When you compare and contrast freedom and liberty side by side, both are accurate translations, both reflect "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom, indeed there is freedom." But liberty captures the intent of the verse a little better.

The illustration: Think about a dog that's genuinely obedient. At the dog park, you can let him off the leash. He's free, but he's free to obey every command. He can be trusted. Good girl. If a dog isn't trustworthy, he's loved just as much, nobody wants to see harm come to him, so he stays on the leash to keep him safe. Both responses are loving. Both are good. That's how God looks at it.

Our constitution and our laws were established for a moral, Christian culture inside that liberty mentality — freedom to act within a framework acknowledged by the founders, not requiring everyone to be a Christian to live here, but framed by that culture nonetheless. There's going to be freedom to make a lot of choices, as long as it stays rooted in obedience to the master who loves us.

Final Thoughts: Esau, Jacob, and What 250 Years Is Really Worth

There's a story in Genesis that ties this whole week together: Jacob and Esau. The birthright was supposed to go to Esau, but he didn't see the value in it. He was ready to sell it for a bowl of stew.

There's more depth to that than usually gets credit. Esau thought it was going to amount to nothing. He probably figured Jacob wouldn't even be able to claim it anyway, so why not trade it for something he could feel right now. He valued the birthright at exactly the price of a bowl of soup, because his hunger and his felt needs came before everything else. Jacob, on the other hand, knew precisely what it was worth, and he went and got it, in ways that wouldn't exactly be called ethical.

The big takeaway from America's 250th is the same lesson:

Pay attention to what you have. Grasp the freedom while it's here and hold onto it tight. Savor the flavor.

It doesn't matter how bad it gets. It doesn't even matter if, eventually, this is part of God's plan for this nation to one day fold, because there's still so much to be thankful for in the Lord Jesus Christ. This isn't home. The politicians aren't what's going to save anybody. Whatever difficulties show up can be met with the understanding that this is what the Lord has said must be walked through, and he's going with us through it, every step. This isn't the end of the story. It's just sojourning, just passing through until the real, eternal home shows up.

And that, even on the Fourth of July, is the number one thing worth being thankful for.