The America I Love
The America I love isn’t always seen on the news — but it is written into our poetry, our dreams, and our deepest aspirations.
In this special July 4th episode of Morning Motivation, I reflect on the complicated truth of America’s past and the power of a nation that, despite its many flaws, aspires to something greater. Liberty. Equality. A world where people can live free and pursue their God-given potential. That vision is still alive — and still worth working toward.
🗓️ Morning Motivation is a daily podcast sharing thoughtful, uplifting messages to help you start your day grounded in purpose and hope.
Transcript
Today is the 4th of July. Now, I know I have listeners from all over the world, but as an American, I'm gonna spend a few minutes talking about America. The America that I love. The America that I love is not necessarily the one you see in the news, although hopefully. Some aspects of it are sometimes reflected in the news.
The America that I love is reflected in our writings, in our poetry, in our music, in our aspirations to be something greater than we are. The America that is the real America was founded by slave owners, and that is the original sin of our nation. One that it took us nearly a century. To stop. And in almost two more centuries, we've still not begun to clean away that stain.
We're a nation that's built on war, conquests, genocide, lies, deceit, division, conflict. None of those are things to be proud of. And that's not the America I love. That's just humans being humans. But what sets America apart is we aspire to something greater. Most nations in history, they aspired only to glory and conquest and rightness, whatever that means.
But America aspires to something greater. We aspire to liberty to equality. Look at our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, where it says All men are created equal. It was a product of its time should be all people are created equal. But setting that, even though at. That moment, the person who wrote it owned other human beings as slaves, which is a bit of a conflict.
It's a lot of a conflict, but the aspiration is still there. Whether or not you fulfill the aspiration has still made America something different from most other nations in the world. We were at least starting by giving lip service to this ideal, and over time we have lived into it more and more. And more.
Most countries, the world would never conduct military or even civil interventions just to help other countries. Often political interests are involved, but sometimes they're not. Much of the work the United States of America does in the world is just because we feel that good needs to be done and other countries have followed us.
Other countries have seen the example set by the United States of America. Said, we want to be more like that. Sometimes America is something to be proud of and other times our actions are less pride inducing. But the ideal remains, and that is the America I love the America that lives in our imagination, in our aspiration, in our hopes and dreams, the America we want to be when we get past all the division and confusion and self.
Serving and all the rest of it. What is left is a group of people who say, we wanna make the world better. We wanna make the world freer. We want to help people live happy, productive lives, fulfilling their God-given potential. We don't always get there. We don't often get there, but we always aspire, and that is the America I love.
