Brainwaves

Until the last few days, my knowledge concerning the sixteenth President of the United States was probably minimal. Born in Kentucky, author and deliverer of the Gettysburg Address, the Great Emancipator, assassinated while in office. It’s recorded that Lincoln, at the offset of the Civil War, said to one of his generals: “If you’re not going to use the Army, I’d like to borrow it for awhile”. His memorial in D.C. sits with the bridge going to Arlington just to its rear, the Viet Nam Wall and the Washington Monument’s pool immediately before it. To learn, however, that he was the grandson of a servant woman bearing the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Virginian plantation owner was news to me. To read of his childhood years being spent in such abject poverty, living in nothing more than back-woods, dirt-floor hunters’ cabins was not all that shocking; but hearing that his family actually endured one severe winter sheltered only by a three-sided shed with the front completely exposed to the weather was a bit more than I expected. Even more, such up-bringing appears to have remained a part of who he was throughout his life. Self-educated through borrowed books, he took no interest at all in his appearance, was accused of being lazy when it came to manual labor, and became our Commander-in-Chief mainly because of his wife’s plotting and the mysterious forces of fate…..

It’s not that the facts lessen my respect for the man at all. I’m not disillusioned to find that he never belonged to any church and did his best to avoid religious discussions. If his manners appear different than I might have expected, his heart was manifested via the charity he extended unto others and I’m quite content to leave his destiny between him and his Creator. His marriage was merely a matter of his having been handcuffed to honor his word, his latter years given to maintaining that commitment regardless of circumstances, and his own welfare hindered through a compassion that over-rode any sense of self-promotion. My reason for addressing such subject is not to point a finger of ridicule at Honest Abe, but to note how often our perception of people falls short of taking in “the whole story”. That fellow at work whose personality is quite unsociable, whose views do not correspond with ours. The relative whose whole approach to their financial affairs makes absolutely no sense to us, whose attitudes give reason to avoid them in general. The human experience, whether one examines it from the perspective of politician, celebrity, or just the guy next door, is an enigmatic meal to digest, to say the least. Only God knows each of us in our entirety; and only in as much as we allow Him to steer us in our horizontal relationships can we know love as it should be…..