My dearest friend Ginny turned 85 in July, or as she likes to call it, 8.5 decades.

I turn 75 in September, or as I like to call it, 3/4 of a century.

In July, we began the 160 year celebration tour.

Almost a year ago, we began talking about how we’d like to celebrate our milestone birthdays.

For Ginny, it was to go to the Santa Fe Opera. For me, it was to go to Sweden to visit Carl Larsson’s home.

Plans made and edited and changed, it has begun.

At the very end of July we went to Bentonville, Arkansas. It was a bonus celebration at the Momentary at Crystal Bridges to hear Mary Chapin Carpenter and others in concert.

Now we are in Taos, New Mexico, for the Opera part of the tour.

Next week we fly to Sweden and then to Germany. The Berlin trip is a bonus celebration to go to the Women’s FIBA World Cup where we will see 16 of the best women’s basketball teams in the world—with the culminating activity to cheer on Team USA.

Birthday blessings to both of us.

My family, like so many others, has a great history of getting together on the 4th of July. One of my favorite places to gather is on land where our family first settled in Texas in 1851.

My brothers and I are stewards of the remaining acreage. One brother built a solar powered home on one portion, and the other brother lives in the home my parents built nearly 50 years ago.

Having a place to call home is a deep American value. I feel so privileged to have a place to rest my feet where my ancestors have walked and farmed and harvested and shared meals and prayed and laughed and argued and lived and died for nearly 200 years.

My brothers and sister in law are marching in the local (McKinney) parade. I declined to join them, sadly, because of the heat. However, their church, First Methodist McKinney, has a huge welcome ministry each year for the parade with hot dogs and snow cones and an air conditioned prime viewing area, and I’m in my comfy chair waiting for the parade to begin.

As I watch the pre-parade gather of red, white, and blue, and brown and black and pink and tan, mostly hatted, pulling carts with children, and carrying tarps and flags and blankets and water bottles, for me, this is America.

Everyone who is here has come from somewhere else. Whether their people walked across the Bering Land Bridge 15,000 years ago or came across the southern border five years ago, all of us are from away.

Seeing this parade of color and joy is the best reminder of the America I love. Oh. And the hot dogs and snow cones, too.

Atlanta knows how to celebrate Juneteenth. As God would have it, I am here in the midst of it.

It started with my best friend wanting to see the Amy Sherald exhibit at the High Museum. And since we were here, why not add a WNBA game on the next day? And somehow missing in the midst of the planning the significance of our travel dates.

So here we are. In these days of America pausing to reexamine the truth of who we are in our 250th year.

It may be fighting cages on the lawn of the White House. It may be corporate sponsors of national events. It may be about starting a war costing billions of dollars and with more lives lost than we can count instead of funding health care.

In Atlanta, I was reminded of what else the truth of America is.

It’s a city full of people wearing a diversity of shirts celebrating the sin of “owning” people finally being abolished when all had been informed of the law’s enactment two and one half years before.

It’s a museum offering free admission for all and filled with people in colorful dress. My very best friend and I were almost the only pale skins in a rainbow sea.

It’s viewing an exhibit of art created by a woman from a small Georgia town honoring the people too often overlooked.

It’s people pausing with deep emotion to view portraits of our former First Lady juxtaposed with one of a woman murdered by police when they entered the wrong house.

It’s going to a women’s basketball game where the players have epitomized what it means to be strong women and who have worked to make sure those opportunities are available to all, particularly through voting.

It’s singing Lift Every Voice And Sing after the National Anthem.

America. The Beautiful.

I have a friend that when he calls he almost always first asks if I’m in Iceland. Others ask what is it about Iceland that draws my best friend and me to return and return yet again.

There is the obvious:

So. Much. Beauty. (Insert 5 million photos from my phone here)

Puffins, of course.

The coffee and the food. (Insert several thousand photos from my phone here)

The respect for the world we’ve been given. Clean air due to thermal power. Naturally pure hot and cold water from the tap. The culture of reuse, recycle, repurpose.

The people: almost all that we meet are friendly and ever so wanting to help. Give a moment, and we launch into delightful conversations. The children are taught English in school, and that not only makes it easy for those from away to get around, it’s also part of the culture of openness and adaptability that thrives here.

It’s not my home, but Iceland is a place that allows me to center in order to face the challenges of home when I return to the United States.

I had a sense of the healing this country gives me on this trip.

When I was here after Hurricane Harvey, I was battered and bruised. Something about the sound of the rushing water at Godfoss broke open a locked place inside me, and I had quite a melt down.

Yesterday, I went and stood in the same place where I had fallen apart in 2017. I felt peace-filled joy, and gave great thanks to God for God’s healing—given with generosity in so very many ways, including this place in God’s own creation.

This is part of the “why Iceland.”