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One of the public schools in our region has announced they will be going to school on Memorial Day, due do the large number of days which were missed due to snow this past winter. Yet that same school system let out for the state basketball tournament in March. What does this tell us about what’s important to us? A pastor recently said to me with a twinkle in his eye: “Our children’s attendance will be down now that BA’AL—I mean, ball—season has started.” I’m concerned that there may be more truth than fiction to that statement!
It’s very telling how we constantly extol the virtues of education on the floor of our State Legislature, but so quickly do away with important historical holidays in that education system. A number of years ago the individual birthdays of Washington and Lincoln got lumped into a single day under the vague term of “President’s Day”, as if these men’s lives weren’t important enough to stand alone and be celebrated individually. You could get the idea any President was as important as Washington, the very Father of our country; or as important as Lincoln, the Liberator of the slaves.
This is what disturbs me so much about a school system refusing to recognize such an important historical holiday as Memorial Day by not dismissing school that day. Memorial Day was set aside for the purpose of remembering the servicemen who’ve laid down their lives to protect our liberties. Two women, during the War Between the States, began to decorate the graves of fallen heroes of that war—both North and South. They did this as a grateful expression for the soldiers’ sacrifice to preserve liberty. The idea caught on all across the nation and, until recent years, when Mr. Obama has had nothing to say concerning the virtues of our Founders, Presidents would generally address the nation and help us remember the great sacrifice it has taken to preserve our liberty. It’s a sad day when we won’t teach our American history to our children. All that has to happen for a dictator to rise to the White House is for one generation to completely forget the principles of liberty established and taught by our Founders; and the sacrifice of past generations to preserve that liberty.
The Bible teaches that we are to remember our history. God says in Deuteronomy 32:7,
“Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations: ask thy father, and he will show thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee.”
God wants us to remember our history because it reveals His Hand at work in our lives; from generations past until now. It links us with our original purpose in what was once, the land of liberty. This is a standard by which to judge where we now are. Can you imagine a carpenter building a house not using a plumb line or a level, so as to create a standard to go back to in order to know if what he’s now doing is staying on track with the original plan for the house?
Daniel Webster, one of the greatest statesmen America has ever known, pled with us not to lose our connection with our Founders; he passionately spoke to future generations when he wrote,
“By ascending to an association with our ancestors; by contemplating their example and studying their character…by accompanying them in their toils, by sympathizing in their sufferings, and rejoicing in their successes; we seem to belong to their age, and to mingle our own existence with theirs…”
(Christian History of the Constitution, Verna Hall, p.245)
Are we on track with the Pilgrim Vision of taking the Gospel of Christ to the next generation? Are you on track with that vision? Who or What is God in your life!!
Think about it; because if you don’t, someone else will do your thinking for you—
and for your children! And you won’t like what that brings to you. I’m Don Pinson, this has been Think About It.