Happy Birthday, America!

It’s going to be hard to be away from you on your birthday this year. We will miss greatly the celebrations that mark another year of you, our country, standing strong and firm.

We love you and our wish for you is that the shining seas on either side of your precious soil would laugh in the sunshine and gently ripple at your borders. We wish for your trees and majestic purple mountains to stand tall and straight against the blue skies in commemoration of your day. And we wish for you the expansive plains with amber waves of grain to sway and bow in your honor.

We think back to your growing up years – the pain of war, but also the joy you must have felt as each state was added to your boundaries until you stand complete and mature today. We thank God for guiding you and keeping you, one nation under God.

We want you to know that even though we are not with you today, there is something within each of us that unexplainable, something maybe called our cultural heritage that makes each of us an American. There’s something about the way we think, the way we feel, the way we reason, that makes us your people – Americans, standing proud. We can’t change that, nor do we want to.

Oh, one last wish: we wish and pray that we and each of our countrymen would turn to God in heartfelt thanks to you, truly, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Happy birthday, America!