Something From the Past

This week we went to Waco to see my parents for a couple of days.  We had a great time and I was finally able to get all of my old files, tucked away in storage.  Rummaging through one of the files I came across a quote I had once read from Abraham Lincoln.  Enjoy and ponder the significance of his words:

"It is the duty of nations, as well as of men, who owe their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon, and to recognize the sublime truth announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by a history that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.  The awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be but a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people.  Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become to self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.  We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has grown, but we have forgotten God."

Abraham Lincoln, April 30, 1863 - on a day he designated as a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer.