Progress in this country never comes easy or quick. For every few hard-earned steps forward, we might stumble a couple steps back. But sometimes, the slow, steady effort of generations is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt. That's exactly what happened in a remarkable sprint of history ten years ago this week.

The Supreme Court upheld a critical part of the Affordable Care Act. A day later, it recognized a Constitutional right to marriage equality. And that same afternoon, a congregation in Charleston, still reeling from a horrifying act of racial violence but fortified by the extraordinary courage of ordinary friends and neighbors, led the country in a chorus of Amazing Grace.

It was a week that reasserted our freedoms. The freedom from fear that random illness or accident could cost us everything. The freedom to marry who we love. The freedom intrinsic to a people who, even when we lose our way, are never bound to the past – but rather great precisely because we can change.

Progress in this country is never guaranteed, either. But that week, it felt like the efforts of so many, across generations, was bending the arc of the moral universe a little more towards justice. I recently sat down with Garrison Hayes to talk about that day, and what it can teach all of us about how change happens.