Greet This Day with a Forgiving Heart

So I am a passenger in the back seat of my truck, heading to Baltimore to move my daughter to her new apartment. My son is driving and my wife occupies the other front seat and they are in constant conversations of which I find to follow being in the back, so I pull out my favorite book (Andy Andrews' the Traveler Gift) and I am reading Chapter 8. For those of you that haven't yet read the book, John David Ponder has just found himself in some sort of a room, no it is a tent of white canvas. Even tho David has just arrived I have been here several times, well because I have read this book several times and I know he is in Gettysburg Pa, and it is November 19th in 1863 around noon time. A tall man enters the tent with his hat under his arm and smiles at David.

We are coming up to the Mason Dixson Line (Pa State Line with Maryland) and so my mind gets distracted and I closed the book and let my mind drift to one of David's earlier visits with Joshua Chamberlain during the Civil War at the battle at Little Round Top. Now I have been to that location a number of times since I moved to Pennsylvania back in 1976, but my visits were nothing like Andy has detailed in the book. Let me just say Joshua made a decision that day literally changed the world! Definitely changed my world and my perspective. So if you haven't read about that event, I charge you to do so.

But the latter date of this particular story involved our 16th President, Abraham Lincoln and he was in Gettysburg to dedicate a cemetery. My mind wonders to the events and conflict that surround us in America these days and how there are so many parallels to those of 1863. Gladly there is no 51,000 dead. Knowing great leadership is required to clear the air and restore order, Lincoln proved to be the man to do it. He was the first Republican president and elected by a minority of the popular vote. Still history will be the final judge and me personally I am hungry for the words that came next! Hoping again for words that will allow the healing to begin again!

"Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon 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 Battlefield of that war. We are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting place of 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 cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground, The Brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, Have consecrated it far beyond our power to add or detract. The world will 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 that they have thus far so nobly carried on, 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 the cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain, that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of Freedom and that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Reflect on these words my fellow Americans and Lets stand together to protect our freedoms and our way of life! God bless America and God has surely blessed you in ways yet to be imagined!