After the agonizing and chaotic week our nation has just weathered, I was thinking that this might not be the most appropriate time to post anything frivolous. While we haven’t been formally engaged in a bloody “civil war”, it has sometimes felt like it, and nobody’s laughing about it.

Instead of putting up with my pithy prose this week, maybe you’d be willing to spend the generous time you share with me each Sunday to remember these powerful words that most of us had to memorize in grade school. The Gettysburg Address. Only 10 sentences long, it took less than 3 minutes to deliver – not much longer than a tweet. It’s the message of peace and sanity and hope that was offered by Abraham Lincoln to his exhausted, broken nation at what was surely its lowest hour. It seems like a comforting reminder of the strength and resilience and tenacity of our remarkable country.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on 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 battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for 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 can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little 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 which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. 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 that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863

Thank you, Mr. Lincoln, for reminding us of what we are often failing but still striving to be.

But on a lighter note, for a more earthy comfort this week, son Matthew and I took a break from watching the TV news and viewed (for the fourth time) my all time favorite movie, “The Shawshank Redemption”. It’s a therapeutic treasure, and a story of hope. It’s on Netflix just in case you could also use a “lift” or you’re just in the mood for watching – or re-watching – a refreshing movie . . . See you next week!