4187 Love the In-Between
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
Have you ever paused in front of a mirror and thought, almost? Almost healed. Almost confident. Almost the woman you know you're meant to be — but not quite there yet. That pause, that space between where you were and where you're going, can feel like the loneliest place in the world. But what if that's actually one of the most sacred places where you need to love the in-between? Because most of us have been taught — by the world, by our own expectations, sometimes even by voices inside the church or community or your job or your family — that we earn the right to love who we see only...
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4186 Lead with Your Gifts
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
There is something inside of you that the world needs. Not the version of you that has been shaped and polished by degrees, training programs, and years of professional experience — though those things matter. But it runs deeper. Before you ever sat in a classroom or clocked into your first job, God planted something in you that was never meant to collect dust; lead with your gifts. Too many of us have spent years building lives around what we've learned while quietly setting aside what we've been given. We show up to work with our skill sets. We volunteer with our expertise. We check the...
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4185 And That's A Wrap!
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
You cross the finish line. You hit the milestone. You reach that thing you've been praying over, grinding toward, and believing God for — and you exhale. And that's a wrap. Or is it? When you accomplish a goal or finally touch a long-held dream, do you stop? Do you sit down, dust off your hands, and call it done? Or does something inside you whisper, "There's more?" It's very interesting how we see life. The moments can feel like a year, when it might have been only a day. But nothing worth having comes in a moment. Desire to be supported and encouraged by other like-minded women? Join...
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4184 Come and See
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
There are seasons in life when the darkness feels closer than it should. When the weight of what you're walking through presses in from every side and you start to wonder if the light you once felt so sure of is still there. Maybe it's grief. Maybe it's uncertainty. Maybe it's a weariness that has settled so deeply into your bones that you can't remember what rest feels like. Wherever you are right now, whatever shadow has crept into the edges of your story, do something simple and holy — come and see. Come and see that the light has not gone out. Desire to be supported and encouraged by...
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4183 Don't Let the Calendar Replace the Connection
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
You married your best friend. You chose each other. And somewhere along the way, the life you're building together started pulling you apart — not because the love faded, but because everything else got louder. You're not fighting. You're not even frustrated with each other most days. You're just missing each other; sitting in the same house but living in different rhythms. And that quiet distance? It didn't happen because of one bad day. It happened one full week at a time. So when life crowds in on your marriage, don't let the calendar replace the connection. However, the biggest threat to...
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4182 Listening Is Love
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
It's not that unheard of to want to explain everything to your children. We carry decades of life behind us, and we think if we can just say the right thing at the right time, we can spare them the pain. But regardless of their age and stage of life, what they need is your presence. Not your lecture. Not your five-point plan. Your presence; listening is love. You don't have to have all the answers. You don't have to be the problem-solver every single time. What they need from you is ears to hear. Desire to be supported and encouraged by other like-minded women? Join us at the . ...
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4181 The Heat Is On
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
There are moments in life when everything feels like it's pressing in — the deadlines, the demands, the weight of expectations, and the relentless pace that never seems to slow down. And right in the middle of all of it, you realize something: the heat is on. Not just the kind that comes from outside pressure, but the kind that rises from within, the fire that tells you it's time to move, to grow, to step into the fullness of who you are and who you are created to be. No matter what happens in your day, at some point you have to be willing to go the extra mile, play full out, and do whatever...
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4180 The Soil No One Talks About
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
People will tell you about the blooming, the breakthrough, and the moment they finally stepped into the calling God placed on their life, where everything clicks because He has been planning it all along. But nobody really talks about the soil no one talks about — the stuff underneath the surface that made the bloom possible in the first place. The seasons that felt more like a burial than planting. The prayers that seemed to bounce off the ceiling. The plans you laid out in good faith that God, in His gentle sovereignty, folded up and tucked away. And if you've been in one of those...
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4179 Set the Pace for Your Daily Race
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
Have you ever watched a tennis match and noticed the winner isn't always the one hitting the hardest? Sometimes it's the one who knows when to slow down, when to push forward, and when to reset between points. With the US Open in full swing right now, there's no better time to be reminded that the way we approach our daily lives mirrors what's happening on those courts in Flushing Meadows. It's time to set the pace for your daily race — not someone else's, not the world's, but the one God specifically designed for you. Tennis is a game of rhythm. Every elite player has a routine between...
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4178 Laboring For What Lasts
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
There's something beautifully ironic about Labor Day. It's the one day of the year when we're told to stop laboring — to set down the to-do list, fire up the grill, and just breathe. But as the burgers sizzle and the kids splash in the last pool days of summer, a quiet question has a way of surfacing: What am I really working for? Today, as we celebrate the gift of rest, let's talk about Laboring for What Lasts — and why the answer to that question shapes everything. Jesus said it plainly in Matthew 6:21 (NIV): "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Desire to be...
info_outlineTwo hundred and fifty years ago, somebody planted something for you. They didn't know your name. They couldn't picture your face. They had no idea what century you'd be born in, what your life would look like, or whether you'd spend this particular July Fourth at a backyard barbecue, watching fireworks from a blanket in the grass, or reading something on your phone while the kids run through a sprinkler out back. They couldn't have imagined any of it. But they planted anyway, the garden we were given.
And today — 250 years later, on the semiquincentennial of the most consequential experiment in self-governance the world has ever seen — you are standing in the garden they gave you.
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The question worth asking on a birthday this significant is not just how did we get here? It's three questions, woven together like the strands of a flag: What did we receive? What did it cost? And what do we owe?
What We Received
Let's start with the gifts, because gratitude is the right place to begin any celebration.
You received the right to say what you believe without disappearing in the night for saying it. You received the freedom to worship — or not worship — according to your own conscience. You received the ability to disagree with your government loudly, publicly, and without fear of a prison cell. You received courts and laws and a system built, however imperfectly, on the idea that no person is above accountability.
You received the ability to build a life. To work, to own, to move, to dream, to fail, and to try again. You received a passport that opens more doors than almost any other document on earth. You received amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties, and a Fourth of July sky that belongs to everyone who calls this place home.
These are not small things. In the long sweep of human history, they are extraordinary things — things that billions of people across centuries and continents have lived and died never experiencing.
Thomas Jefferson, who understood both the glory and the weight of what they were declaring, framed it this way:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Unalienable. Not granted by a king. Not loaned by a government. Endowed by a Creator — which means no earthly power has the authority to take them away.
That is the gift. Receive it today with open hands and a full heart.
What It Cost
Gifts of this magnitude do not arrive without a price tag.
The Declaration of Independence was not a document — it was a target. The moment those fifty-six men signed their names, they signed their safety away. They knew it. John Adams wrote to Abigail the day after the vote for independence with a mixture of joy and unflinching sobriety:
"I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this Declaration... Yet through all the gloom I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory."
Toil. Blood. Treasure. He listed them plainly, without flinching, because he was an honest man and he knew the cost was real. And he signed anyway, because the light was worth it.
That cost did not end in 1776. It has been paid, and paid again, by every generation that came after. By the soldiers at Gettysburg and Normandy and Chosin and Fallujah. By the mothers who packed lunches and wrote letters and held everything together while someone they loved was far away and in danger. By the first responders who run toward what everyone else runs from. By the teachers, the volunteers, the quiet faithful who never made headlines but never stopped showing up.
Freedom has a long receipt. It stretches back 250 years, and it is still being added to today.
On a day of celebration, we owe it to all of them to remember that. Not to dampen the joy — the joy is right and good and worth every sparkler and parade and slice of pie. But to let the gratitude run deep enough to include the ones who made today possible.
"Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends." (John 15:13)
That verse was not written about soldiers. But it has been lived out by them — and by parents, and firefighters, and a thousand kinds of ordinary people who chose someone else's freedom over their own comfort. Pause today, even briefly, and let their sacrifice land on you. They earned the right to be remembered.
The K.I.S.S. ~ Happy Birthday, America!
What We Owe
Here is where the birthday gets serious for a moment — because 250 years is not just an occasion for looking back. It is a summons to look forward.
The founders were remarkably clear-eyed about this. They knew what they were building would only survive if the people who inherited it were willing to tend it. Benjamin Franklin, when asked what kind of government they had produced, reportedly answered with words that have echoed for two and a half centuries:
"A republic, if you can keep it."
If you can keep it. Four words that turn a gift into a responsibility.
A garden given and then neglected does not stay beautiful. It goes to weeds slowly, almost imperceptibly, until one day you look up and realize that what was once tended and flourishing has become something you no longer recognize. The keeping of it — the daily, unglamorous, often thankless work of tending — is not optional. It is the price of the inheritance.
So what do we owe?
We owe engagement. Showing up, staying informed, participating in the ongoing experiment of self-governance rather than spectating from the sidelines and complaining about the outcome.
We owe each other. A nation is not just a government — it is a people. And a people who have stopped seeing each other as neighbors, as fellow inheritors of the same gift, as human beings made in the image of the same God, cannot hold what was given to them. The care of the republic begins with the care of the person standing next to you.
We owe the next generation. Just as the founders planted for people they would never meet, we are planting right now for children who will stand where we are standing and look back on what we did with what we were given. What will they find? A garden tended or a garden neglected? A nation strengthened or one that coasted on the courage of people long gone?
The Psalmist put it beautifully:
"One generation commends your works to another; they tell of your mighty acts." (Psalm 145:4)
That passing down — of story, of valor, of faith, of responsibility — is not automatic. It requires intention. It requires people who believe the story is worth telling and the work is worth continuing.
Two Hundred Fifty Years of Bloom
Think about what has been accomplished in 250 years.
A handful of colonies became fifty states stretching from sea to shining sea. A population of three million became a nation of three hundred and thirty million, woven together from every country, culture, and corner of the earth. A fledgling experiment in democracy became the longest-running constitutional republic in history. Men and women born on this soil have fed the world, healed the sick, walked on the moon, and carried a torch of liberty that has lit the way for nations that didn't yet exist when the Declaration was signed.
None of it was inevitable. All of it was earned.
And all of it — every freedom you will exercise today without a second thought, every right you take for granted because it has always been there, every firework that lights up tonight's sky — all of it traces back to that hot room in Philadelphia, where a group of imperfect, visionary, deeply human people decided that the idea of freedom was worth more than the safety of silence.
So tonight, when the first firework climbs into the dark and bursts open over your head in a shower of light, let it mean something more than spectacle.
Let it be a spark — the same spark that started all of this. Let it be a root — grown deep through 250 years of sacrifice and faithfulness. Let it be a seed — planted tonight in the hearts of your children, who will carry this forward long after we are gone.
Celebrate loudly. Grieve humbly. Tend faithfully.
This is the garden we were given.
Keep it.
"Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord." (Psalm 33:12)
Happy Birthday, America.
Two hundred and fifty years young — and still becoming.
"Be present. Be incredible. Be YOU!!!"
#Relationships #CreateYourNow #Inspiration
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Cover Art by Jenny Hamson
Photo by Canva.com
Music by Mandisa - Overcomer
http://www.mandisaofficial.com
Song ID: 68209
Song Title: Overcomer
Writer(s): Ben Glover, Chris Stevens, David Garcia
Copyright © 2013 Meaux Mercy (BMI) Moody Producer Music (BMI)
One Songs (ASCAP) Ariose Music (ASCAP) Universal Music -
Brentwood Benson Publ. (ASCAP) D Soul Music (ASCAP) (adm. at CapitolCMGPublishing.com) All rights reserved. Used by permission.