As I can, I’ve been watching “The American Experiment” on Netflix. I highly recommend it. The series is an honest, thorough, and positive presentation of the roots of the United States of America. In it, one of the presenters describes our country as an aspirational nation. This means that we were not founded simply to preserve a national entity as is. To be aspirational indicates that we have values and ideals to which we continually strive. Our country was established with the understanding that we had not “arrived” but would constantly seek to do so.
For example, “liberty and justice for all” is an ideal toward which we have worked for 250 years. And we are still working at it. (The phrase “all men are created equal” was penned by a man who owned other human beings as slaves.) Our aspiration toward liberty and justice for all forced us to face the painful, necessary truth that humans owning other humans is wrong. It has also guided us through the struggle for the rights and dignity of women. It has given voice to the labor movement. It still speaks to issues around civil rights. (We pretty much failed to live out the ideal with indigenous peoples.) And now we’re trying to sort it out with people who live and love differently than what many describe as the “norm.”
An aspirational identity requires honesty; recognizing where we as a nation have succeeded and are succeeding, as well as facing where we are falling short of that to which we aspire. We will always be figuring it out in constantly new and unfolding territory, and that’s good. This doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it does mean it’s right.
Followers of Jesus know the aspirational terrain. Loving God and loving others as God in Christ loves us beckons us continually in new and unfamiliar settings. We never arrive in this life; we are always aspiring toward…
I’ll see you around the next bend in the river.
THE LAST RIVER MILE 
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