Dear SCC & Friends,
The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of His heart from generation to generation.
~Psalm 33:11
Update #69
Edmund Burke, Irish statesman and philosopher once said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” This July 4th marks our country’s 245th birthday. The Declaration of Independence was signed by 56 men who pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor. They affirmed self-evident truths that we are endowed with unalienable rights by our Creator, not government…an endowment of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (virtue). Eighty-seven years later, our nation was in the midst of a terrible civil war. This week marks 158 years since the Battle of Gettysburg. It lasted three days from July 1-3, resulting in 51,000 casualties. It is hard to imagine such carnage. The Northern victory turned the tide of the war, ultimately preserving our national union and ending the scourge of slavery. Four months later, Abraham Lincoln put it in historic perspective.
The Gettysburg Address
“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 battlefield 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 cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate—we cannot 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 here 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.” Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord… ~Psalm 33:12aMay He help us to be faithful as His truth is marching on… Keep up the good work!
Remembering on the 4th,
Kevin