My writing style in these posts is what most editors would call a shotgun style...shooting a widespread pattern the further away from the target I get or covering everything and everyone with no focus on one particular thing. Up close, however, I could blow a hole in your preconceived notions if the Spirit's working on you. Needless to say, this whole introduction is prompted by the picture at the left taken at Hershey Park in one of those "dress up like the old days" shops. Union uniform seemed most appropriate or great grandpappy would have had a fit, so I picked a brigadier general's coat (two stars on the shoulders you can't see) and the ubiquitous unmarked kepi similar to the one that Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain wore. For the uninitiated, Chamberlain was the colonel at the Battle of Gettysburg who was instrumental in turning back the Confederate attack on Little Round Top. He eventually got a Congressional Medal of Honor for that action and also ended up with five serious wounds that bothered him for the rest of his long life (he got them in later battles). Most importantly in eternal perspective, he was a Christian, so I'll get to shoot the breeze with him and a bunch of other Civil War icons when I "cross the river and rest in the shade of the trees" as Stonewall Jackson of the CSA said before passing into glory.One interesting (at least to me) bit of Civil War trivia: Christian Confederate General John Brown Gordon, also wounded five times (at the Battle of Antietam actually) surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Chamberlain when ordered to do so by General Lee. The mutual respect showed as a result of their graciousness...Chamberlain called his men to stand at attention when Confederates passed and Brown touched the tip of his sword to his boot as he got his horse to bow in acknowledgment...was yet another step that a different sort of Band of Brothers initiated to begin healing the torn apart nation.
It's interesting, too, that Gordon's story of the Civil War, Reminiscences of the Civil War, points out that the reason the South lost the Civil War was so that the nation could remain a whole in order to fight the Spanish American War in 1898 when Gordon wrote his book. Just the fact that he used the term "Civil War" put him at odds with a lot of Southerners who wanted to call it "The War Between the States." That is even more ironic because General Robert E. Lee called it a Civil War in a letter to his wife in 1861. Oh, well...
In Judges 3:1-2, it says, "Now these are the nations which the LORD left, to test Israel by them (that is, all who had not experienced any of the wars of Canaan; only in order that the generations of the sons of Israel might be taught war, those who had not experienced it formerly). " Then there's the line in Matthew 10:34 where the Prince of Peace says He did not come to bring peace but the sword. I wonder how many times the Lord will have to continue to use war to get His people's attention?
Got a guess?
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