Friends, Family, and Freedom

          Giving thanks helps our well-being. Studies show it, and personal experience confirms it.
I’m thankful this Fourth of July for my loved ones and for our nation.
          My younger brother, Chad, my workout buddy Corey, and I all camped under the stars last weekend in Decatur, Michigan. First, we got unintentionally soaked. Then we hiked over dirt trails, carrying heavy backpacks, and we canoed down the Dowagiac River, toting our gear. We did this in anticipation of a five-day hike and paddle across Isle Royale later this summer. Blue herons guided our boats by day. The Milky Way expanded our imaginations by night.
          By the campfire, I wondered aloud, as all our ancestors must have done before. Who are we in this vast universe? How should we live? I leaned toward my brother. “If we’d been born in the old days, any doubt we would have gone west?”
          Chad bit into his steaming bratwurst, chewed deliberately, then shook his head. “No need to ask.”
          We would have gone west together.
          I’m thankful for my brother. If our nation contains 250 years’ worth of fresh trails, going back to George Washington, then Chad and I have hiked fifty-five great years’ worth—all overlapping.
          I’m thankful for Corey, too. You can’t impress your workout buddy with your strength or endurance because he already knows exactly how much you can lift and how many reps you can do. He knows when you’re making progress toward your goal—and when you’re not—and he forces you to reassess your purposes. Corey’s becoming a son to me. I’m becoming a father to him.
          Like the urbanite protagonists in the movie City Slickers, Chad, Corey, and I headed into our latest outdoor camping adventure wishing to find elusive answers to complex personal questions. Here are three of my puzzlers, all writing-related, and all still mostly unanswered:

• How do I GET MOVING in the morning? (Fibromyalgia shackles a person with iron chains, tosses him into quicksand, then submerses him with a wooden club.)
• Can I overcome my primitive emotional and physical reactions against technological hurdles? (My natural impulses currently sap my strength and hinder my writing progress.)
• Can I rest in God’s peace and yet press on with fortitude toward the deepest purposes of my heart? (I do not know.)

          In subsequent posts, I hope to revisit these questions and, through fiction and fantasy, offer partial solutions, with practical implications. But that must wait for another day.
          Because on this Independence Day, July 4th, 2025, I give thanks to God for his abundant blessings to us all. I say thank you for fine friends, for our national freedoms, and for the capacity to dream of a better tomorrow.
          May God receive my thanks—our thanks—with pleasure. May he demonstrate his transformational love to our friends and family through us. May the Lord bless our nation with the inexhaustible riches of his kindness. May he give us answers to our deepest questions so that we may share them with one another and overflow with delight along the trails ahead.

---

---

If you liked this post, please send it to a friend. If the reading audience grows, agents and publishers become suddenly far more keen on joining in the Adventures of TAT!

Copy URL to Clipboard