3:00 in the morning. Woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. Don’t know what that has to do with anything except that I turned on the TV and there was a documentary on the war, World War II that is. It was on because we are fast approaching what once was referred to as Armistice Day and now is known as Veterans Day. Or at least it should be known as either one or the other and yet I feel that many within our nation don’t even know that such a day exists.
While watching this documentary I became humbly aware of an aspect rampant in our nation at THAT time that I feel is absent within our United States today.
Whether it was shock of what President Roosevelt stated that the events of Dec. 7, 1941 were the actions of “a dastardly and cowardly act of the Imperial Empire of Japan,” or the pathos of the Bataan Death March or the invasion of June 6, 1944 or the final surrender of what this nation felt to be the enemy on Aug. 15, 1945 and the year immediately following, this nation was united.
Today, this unity, this oneness of a people pulling together is not evident in our nation; at least not evident to me. A house or a nation divided within itself cannot and will not stand. All too often as deterioration takes place those who live within the confines of whatever the structure take the attitude that what has happened to others in the past can’t happen to us. But, history also shows that those who take such an attitude are wrong.
On this Veterans Day let us remember the lives of those who have served this nation in time of peace and in time of war and who have bought for me and you the freedom to be able to write the views I’m now writing, who have bought for us the freedom to speak our feelings, to share our hurts and to rally our populace to once again surrender ourselves to God and become united in our spiritual life.
Because we as a nation, and ultimately as a world, do not heed the call, the love, the forgiveness and the passionate compassion of God, I’m not only afraid we will go on fighting wars but that we will also cease to exist as a nation. I do believe that unless we, as a nation, change our ways and put God at the center, a great revolution is brewing. Perhaps not a revolution of internal armed conflict but there will be some kind of uprising with an ultimate national destruction. Perhaps it will not take place in our lifetimes, but it will take place and I tremble at the thought that such a collapse will be the legacy I helped leave for our grandchildren.
This is not a letter of doom and gloom; but it is, so to speak, a call to arms to take the centrality of God with intimate seriousness. NOT out of fear of what could take place without God, but rather, of putting God at the center of our lives because we want and know that only in that sense can we again become that which our forefathers put forth. So if you haven’t, then find a Church and join those who have, to get off your duffs and put forth the strength of God.
R.E. Middleton
Tonasket
