Fire up the barbecue grill, strike up the bands, gather your family around.

It's time to celebrate the Fourth of July. For most of us it means picnics and backyard barbecues, taking in parades and fireworks, enjoying a long weekend as summer and all its fun stretches before us.

It's a grand time. We hope all your celebrations are fun-filled and you take joy in your family gatherings.

But we also hope you take a moment to reflect on how we got here as a nation.

The fireworks over the weekend are in part to remind us of the "bombs bursting in air" that Francis Scott Key memorialized in a poem after watching the American defense of Fort McHenry against the British in the War of 1812. When dawn came the stars and stripes were still flying.

Key's poem, of course, became our national anthem - a celebration of our country's will and determination to survive and thrive and to defend our hard-fought freedoms.

That is our birthright as a nation.

This year, July 4, 2009, there are those who would say Old Glory is a bit frayed around the edges. Our nation's debt is growing, the country's economy is in recession, many Americans have lost jobs, we have friends and family fighting wars in far-flung places.

Those are harsh realities, but this nation has seen and survived much worse.

We took note this week of the celebrations in Iraq where America has lost many sons and daughters in the past several years deposing a tyrant and trying to bring peace to a trouble land.

As American troops pulled back from Iraqi cities, Iraqi President Jalal Talibani marked the return of sovereignty to his country saying: "While we celebrate this day, we express our thanks and gratitude to our friends in the coalition forces who faced risks and responsibilities and sustained casualties and damage while helping Iraq to get rid from the ugliest dictatorship and during the joint effort to impose stability and security."

Iraq still has a long ways to go, but at least it has a chance to forge its own destiny and that is due in part to the sacrifices of our military men and women and those of other countries.

For Iraq and for America, July 2009 is a time for hope and for rededication to the causes of country and liberty and to recognize the sacrifices of those who have given their lives to secure them.

No one has expressed those sentiments better than our country's 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, as he dedicated the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pa., four months after the pivotal battle in the Civil War that tore our country apart:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate - we can not consecrate - we can not hallow - this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth."

Lincoln's words ring as true today as they did in 1863. They challenge us to celebrate and rededicate ourselves to our country and its freedoms. Happy Fourth of July.