Independence Day

No disrespect to Woodie Guthrie: he had no clue what he was talking about.  And he was flat out wrong.

This 4th of July began as they have for the past several years with our annual breakfast run:  The largest we've had with 14 bikes, 2 cars, and 22 people.  Today turned out to be a warm day.  An hour ride to Kearney, breakfast called ahead to accommodate the large number, and by 11 we were on our way north out of town to continue with a ride around the countryside.

It was that ride that stands out the most.  The sun was shining, and the sights and smells of the Nebraska Countryside rolled on by.  Cornfields, soybeans, hay, alfalfa, interspersed with the occasional farmstead, the rolling hills of prairie and forest, were remarkable.  A ride in the wide open rolling expanse of the sandhills culminated the after-breakfast ride, and it hit me like a thunderbolt:  This land is bigger than you or me.  It's high time we begin to recognize that it exists and will persist, despite our ingenuity or our flaws, of which we've had plenty of both throughout our brief history among the nations.

These days we want to make it all about us.  Often it's about us vs. them.  Yes, we are more divided than ever.  And yet the land itself - the very creation we are called to tend - dwarfs the problems and divisions, which are really nothing new.  This persistent error that the land was made for you and I is part of the attitude that lends itself to these divisions.  The sense of entitlement - or ownership - contributes to it.

Maybe America needs to to take a collective motorcycle ride across the vast expanses of this great nation, and see the beauty of it all.  Passing those out riding - none of whom I likely even had ever met before - and giving the hand down signal of the brotherhood of two wheeled riders, to me united us not because of what we rode, but because of what we were riding through.

Oddly enough it was the words to another song that kept playing through my head while riding today.  This song almost became the nation's anthem.  It acknowledges our flaws, all the while celebrating the good that ultimately can come from those who recognize the stewardship and care that God has given us over a land bigger than all of us, and a land that was never ours to begin with. 

Bates' lyrics really do lend itself to the blueprint of this country:  a blueprint we are rapidly forgetting.


O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain!
America! America! God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet, Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat Across the wilderness!
America! America! God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved And mercy more than life!
America! America! May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness,
And every gain divine!

O beautiful for patriot dream That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam Undimmed by human tears!
America! America! God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

May we never forget the creator of all things, for as President Ronald Reagan once said, when we cease being one nation under God, we will be a nation gone under.