In 1976, I was born on Main Street, Canton, Georgia, in the United States of America. Not near Main Street. On it. My family goes back generations in Cherokee County, which means I didn't just read about this place growing up. I inherited it. The creeks, the ponds, the clay soil, the green pastures, the sleepy, quaint towns and cities, the particular way people wave when they pass on a rural two-lane road. This is not nostalgia. It is my actual formation.
This year, America turns 250. I turn 50. While I hope not to replicate Adams or Jefferson, who both died on this day, the 50th anniversary of the nation's founding, it's a coincidence I'm willing to exploit.
I've baled hay in fields that are now subdivisions. I've watched pastures turn into parking lots and four-lane intersections with a Chick-fil-A on the corner. I grew up in downtown Woodstock in the 80’s, when it didn't have much going on. I ran around rural Buffington and Hickory Flat in the 90s when running around outside was just called Tuesday. I've seen this place change over decades.
And here's what I know: the land changes, but something underneath it doesn't.
Many of the people who stayed through the change, or came here and chose to put roots down, they carry something real. A particular stubbornness about community. A belief that your neighbor matters, that a handshake means something, that showing up counts. I don't think that belongs to any one family or any one generation. It feels more like something the land itself holds onto. New people move in, old families move on, the names on the mailboxes change, and somehow the place keeps producing real people. That's not a Cherokee County thing, exactly. It's an American thing. But I've watched it live and breathe in this specific patch of Georgia, and it has shaped so much about who I am.
The closest I'll ever be to a founding father was founding Reformation Brewery, and it started here. Not in Atlanta. Not in some trendier zip code. Here. In Cherokee County, the former “Broiler Capital of the World,” in the community where I was formed. That decision wasn't a strategy. It came from a belief that what we needed to build didn’t need pretense; it just needed pursuing.
"Here" is not just a location. Here is a practice. Here is the opposite of pressure. Here is the belief that you don't have to perform to belong.
And here's a thing I've noticed over fifty years that I think gets missed in most of the loud conversations about this country: the loudest people are usually the least critical, the least mindful, and the ones doing the least living.
Certainty closes doors. Self-righteousness, whatever flavor it comes in, political, religious, or cultural, always narrows the world down to people who agree with you and people who need correcting. And once you've sorted everyone into those two buckets, you've stopped pursuing much of anything. You've stopped being curious about your neighbor. You've stopped being surprised by people. You've traded the actual messy work of living alongside other free people for the much easier work of being right.
That's not liberty. That’s a hellscape dressed up in Sunday’s best, strong and wrong.
The pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, the actual pursuit, requires a kind of humility that self-righteousness and certainty can't survive. You can't pursue happiness while you're digging and fortifying a trench, too busy defending a position. You can't really live alongside people while you're managing whether they measure up. The folks I've known who seem most free, the ones who actually seem to be living rather than performing a life, are almost never the ones who are sure of everything. They're the ones who stayed mindful and curious. Who could change their mind without it costing them their identity. Who treated their neighbor as someone to know rather than someone to convince.
I've seen both versions up close because I've lived both versions. There were times, years, I spent more certain than curious, and I’d say looking back, those were not my best times/years. They were not the years of much liberty at all, even though I probably would have told you otherwise at the time. But the years I've spent being curious, willing to be wrong, willing to sit across the table from someone who sees it differently and just listen, those are the moments, times, years that have actually felt like freedom.
A truly free country runs on that same principle, scaled up. The framers of our country wrote down an aspiration they hadn't yet lived out, and the 250 years since have been an argument, sometimes a brutal one, about what it actually means to take that aspiration seriously. The progress hasn't come from people who were already certain they had the answer. It comes from people willing to keep examining the gap between what we said and what we did, and to keep closing it.
That's the version of America I want to celebrate this year. Not the one that thinks it has arrived. The one still in pursuit. Still willing to confess its own hypocrisy. Still curious enough to keep examining itself. Still humble enough to keep getting better.
I've had the privilege of watching this principle play out at the most ordinary scale in a most ordinary place I get to call “work”. Reformation aspires to welcome all to gather in her space. And the space only works when nobody has to prove anything to sit at it. Dogs, kids, grandparents, college kids, the regular at the corner couch who's been coming in every Thursday for years, they all share the same space without anyone needing to be right about anything. Nobody has to justify what's in their glass to belong. That's a small thing. It's also the whole thing. And it has to be nourished and defended from those seeking to make it about themselves and their certainty.
The morning coffee. The neighborly conversation across backyards. The shared look across a crowded room. The collective cheers or jeers when the goal is scored. The everyday, unspectacular construction of a life together, stone by stone. That's not a brewery model. That's a country model, worth pursuing.
I love my home. I love my country. I love my family. I love my friends. I love my God.
Those aren't small things dressed up in big emotions. They're the entire thing. They're what the last 250 years have been building toward, and what the next 250 will depend on. Not certainty. Not winning the debate. Not your side owning the other. Just enough humility to stay curious about each other, and enough freedom to actually go live, rather than spending our lives defending a position about how to live.
I'm a Cherokee County kid who chose to plant something here instead of somewhere easier, who believes the best version of this country looks a lot like what I've been lucky enough to live. Not perfect. Not without loss or failure. But real. Rooted. Curious. Full of people still in pursuit. Living their American Dream.
America at 250 is not finished. Neither am I at 50.
That feels right to me. That feels like the whole point.