07/04/2026
Two hundred and fifty years.
To God, it is but a breath. To us, it is generations of names carved into headstones, folded flags placed in trembling hands, whispered prayers in foxholes, tears shed in courtrooms, songs sung in sanctuaries, and children born into a freedom they did not earn.
Perhaps that is the greatest danger of freedom—we begin to believe it is ours by right instead of ours by stewardship.
Freedom has never been free.
It was purchased by those who risked everything for an idea they might never live to see. It has been preserved by soldiers willing to stand watch while others slept, by first responders who run toward danger, by teachers who shape minds, by parents who teach virtue, by citizens who choose service over self, and by ordinary people whose quiet sacrifices rarely make history books.
But even they would remind us that liberty has a deeper Author.
Every human being bears the image of God. Because of that sacred truth, freedom is more than a political principle; it is a divine affirmation of human dignity. Long before there was an America, there was a God who heard the cries of people in bo***ge and declared that oppression would never have the final word.
Yet freedom can be lost long before a nation falls.
It is lost whenever truth becomes negotiable. Whenever justice favors the powerful. Whenever comfort silences compassion. Whenever we stop seeing our neighbor as someone to love and begin seeing them only as someone to defeat.
A nation is not measured only by how well it protects the strong, but by how faithfully it remembers the weak—the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the veteran carrying invisible wounds, the child who is hungry, the elderly who are forgotten, the lonely, the addicted, the imprisoned, the grieving. If our freedom does not make room for them, then we have misunderstood the very gift we celebrate.
And our responsibility does not end at the edge of our shores.
The Kingdom of God has never recognized national borders. If we have been blessed with liberty, then our calling is not simply to preserve it for ourselves but to become people through whom others experience freedom—freedom from hunger, fear, injustice, loneliness, despair, and ultimately the bo***ge of sin through Jesus Christ.
As America marks 250 years, perhaps the most faithful prayer is not, “God, keep us free.”
Perhaps it is, “God, make us worthy of the freedom You have entrusted to us.”
For one day, history will not ask what rights we claimed.
Heaven will ask what we did with the freedom we were given.
Linda Boxler-Wansing
