God has always been victorious, throughout the history of mankind, through our pain and our suffering, our inability to understand his ways. BUT, mere mortals, how can we worship a God, which we understand. For God to be God he does not need anything, he could have established a world free of warfare, problem free to those to whom he had given freedom. He could have provided three million fiery chariots to deliver his chosen, three million Jewish slaves, from Egypt. He could bring the entire city of Chicago to its knees and in repentance, salvation, if he desired. He is Boss and we are to trust him.
This writer's closest companion is the radio; I keep several on all the time, particularly the short wave. Sunday, December 7, is Pearl Harbor Day. All of the programs today, Sunday, religious and otherwise, I have not heard Pearl Harbor remembrance mentioned. Just think 2,400 men were killed at this faraway pacific harbor. Like the butterfly effect, motions--movements of distrust from Asia, turmoil in Europe, every evil entanglement slowly moving toward the worst world war in the history of man.
Back then, 1941, as now; this ten-year-old boy was listening to the radio. I was in the fire room, (Houses, even in the cities, knew nothing of centralized heat. Country homes, heat in the sitting room and the kitchen) it was a very cold December Sunday of my grandparents home. I announced to others in the room, "The Japanese have attacked America at Pearl Harbor." Of course, then as now, my relatives did not think I knew what I was talking about. They could not understand my smart mind. Most Americans have never heard of Pearl Harbor, even the Hawaiian Islands. The Korean conflict is the war in which I was involved... Years Later. But, there were still WWII veterans under my command. Several told me that they went to a war not knowing anything at all about the geography of the world. Such as our school systems then and now.
My parents, both my mother and father were raised in houses that survived the Civil War. Most American families back then, were large. Furniture was handmade, very expensive. In my grandparent’s homes, there were not enough chairs to seat families at the table. I believe every home had a long bench, where children were seated. Some had a bench on each side of the dining table, my grandparents, just one side. Most of the young men who fought in WWII came from poor homes. It has always been the poor and disenfranchised who fought the battles for our nation. In the Revolutionary and Civil war, wealthy young men took along with them a slave to do their fighting.
One of my uncles, whose brothers took up one bench at his family's table all went to war. Several in Europe, two including my uncle in the pacific. He was young, had never been anywhere. He told me, "I was so homesick, I thought I would die." Three of his brothers were wounded, but they all came back and resumed their lives, raised families and to the best of my knowledge, never asked the government for anything. I never knew a boy from a poor home to get nominated to a military academy. Because of inadequate education few poor boys were ever commissioned as officers. But, today, 100 years after WWI in which many of the fathers of the WWII service men served, we know that 126,000 are buried on foreign soil. One of my maternal grandfather's brothers was an officer in WWI, having served with President T. R. Roosevelt and was killed. Somehow, perhaps because he had married into wealth or political influence his body was returned. It was a time when all families depended on horses for transportation. My mother, just a child, said she had never seen so many beautiful horses, soldiers and guns at a funeral. Until recently, America knew how to honor its warriors.
In this post Christian world, when even church members love the world more that they love the WORD, everything has changed at the church house. As a child, I saw those old people, at that old country church, get up from hard church bench pews and go to the front of the church to kneel at hard benches around the pulpit. They believed in the power of prayer, believed that the same power that had raised Jesus from the grave, the same power that had taken a small boy's lunch and had fed thousands, the same power that had delivered three million Jewish slaves through the red sea on dry ground could save their loved ones and could save their country. Hanging behind the pulpit in our country church was a large banner with a blue star for every man fighting in the war affiliated with the church, probably 100. At the end of the war there was not one gold star.
In my Christian experience, it is easier to be a base than to abound... Easier to go along with the crowd and their disbelief than to abound--wrestle, using the full power of the Holy Spirit (Ephesians, 6). My favorite hymn "Standing on the Promises". His promises were secure in the past, now, and always, as Rudyard Kipling said "Lest We Forget."
No comments:
Post a Comment