Three years ago tonight, I sat on a friend’s back porch in this same stars-and-stripes tank top, listening to the fireworks start up over Hampton Roads, and I wrote myself a sentence I was sure I believed: I am enough without the fireworks.

I have the post still. I read it back this week, and I want to be honest about what I find in it, because the woman who wrote it was lying to herself in the gentlest way. I was, essentially, talking myself into believing something I did not yet have the feelings to back.

Right above that brave little ending, that same night, I also wrote nothing less will do. I wrote that I wanted the next fireworks to top the last. I’d already met a kind of chemistry, years before, that made everyone who came before it look like backyard sparklers with disappointing finales, and I was holding out for a connection that combustible to come around again. I said I was enough without the fireworks and then spent a thousand words aching for them.

What I didn’t know, writing that, was that the very thing I’d set as my ceiling, the most electric connection I could imagine, would turn out to be a sparkler itself. Something louder was coming. Something that would make everything I’d ever called fireworks look small. I got more than I asked for. Far more. That was the problem.

I’m not going to tell that whole story here. What I can say is this: I have learned, in the years between that porch and this beach, that fireworks are not the thing you build a life on. They can’t be. That isn’t what they’re for. Fireworks are a ten-minute event, sound and light and heat, gone before the smoke clears. Try to live inside them and you don’t get a home. You get a war… which, if you know your history, is exactly what fireworks were invented to sound like.

Now, I’ll share how I actually spent this Fourth because it is the whole answer to that old post.

I started it the way I start every day now. Alone, before first light, at the river. I watched the sun come up over the York, sipped my coffee at the edge of the world waking up, and then I went and stood along Water Street for the parade… the fife and drum, the antique cars, the whole small-town pageant of a place that likes to remind you it’s where the Revolution was won. Later, a friend joined me, and we walked through the American Revolution Museum, and then we did the most ordinary and perfect thing: we sat on the beach until evening.

I brought my ukulele. I played the songs I’ve written, and some of them I wrote three summers ago… the same summer I wrote that other post, aching on that porch. I sat on the sand this year and played the music of the woman who didn’t yet know what was coming, and I was so much gentler with her than I expected to be.

The sun never really set. Clouds sat on the horizon and swallowed the gold before it could pour out. Three years ago that would have felt like a small heartbreak, a finale withheld. This year, I wasn’t disappointed at all because I knew the fireworks were coming. I had learned to trust that the light shows up in whatever form it’s commanded.

And it did. After dark, from a grassy spot away from the crowds, I watched them launch from a barge out on the river… right over the water where I meet the sunrise every single morning. They bloomed and fell and bloomed again, and they reflected in the York exactly the way the dawn does, the same trembling column of light laid out across the same dark water. The loud light and the quiet light, in the very same spot, the spectacular and the serene juxtaposed in my mind. The once-a-year wonder rose off the exact spot that gives me the every-morning one.

I stood there and I loved them. That is the part the girl on the porch could never have understood. I don’t want to live in the fireworks anymore. I don’t want electric or cosmically charged or a life that runs on constant combustion because I finally understand the cost of that brand of fuel. Essentially, I am free now to simply enjoy them when they come… rare, and bright, and all the more magnificent for how seldom the sky lights up that way.

I’ll admit that calm still doesn’t feel normal to me yet. I spent so long wired for the charge, the intensity, the electric pull of nothing less will do, that stillness registers, some days, like something is missing. I wonder if the quiet means I’ve settled for less. I’m learning, morning by morning, that it doesn’t. Quiet isn’t the absence of something; it’s the presence of peace, and peace was the thing I was starved for the whole time I thought I was craving sparks.

That’s what the sunrise has been teaching me all summer. The light comes, never in an explosion, but slow and faithful and new, and it doesn’t need to roar to hold me. It just shows up, every single morning, whether or not I feel it, and it is always enough. The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies are new every morning. Not new every Fourth of July. Every morning. The fireworks come once a year. The mercy comes daily, quietly, before the crowds are even awake.

Three years ago, I wrote that I was enough without the fireworks, and I hoped it was true.

This year, I sat by the river and watched them fall into the same water that gives me the sunrise, and I found I could hold both. The rare light and the daily one. I am enough without the fireworks. And I am finally free enough to love them when they come.