Celebrating 250th with Victories in the Revolutionary War Coming Through Unexpected Consequences

Celebrating 250th with Victories in the Revolutionary War Coming Through Unexpected Consequences

Guest Writers: Steve and Sally Harms

John Trumbull Surrender of Lord Cornwallis

Recent daily readings seem especially appropriate as we celebrate our nation’s 250th anniversary and thank God for the many blessings He has bestowed on our country. They remind us that some of our greatest victories have emerged from our greatest trials.

When we think about the American Revolution, we often reduce our success to inspiring rhetoric and heroic leadership. The reality was far more complex. Britain was the most powerful nation on earth, having emerged victorious from the Seven Years’ War only twelve years earlier. The American colonies had barely one-fifth the population of Britain, and only about 40 percent of the colonists actively supported independence. Roughly 20 percent remained loyal to the Crown, another 20 percent were enslaved and had little voice in the conflict, and many others simply hoped to stay out of it.

One often-overlooked factor in the American victory was biological. When Britain shifted its military campaign to the South, its troops encountered a formidable enemy they scarcely understood.

The organism, named 180 years after the Declaration of Independence, was Plasmodium falciparum and spread by the Anopheles mosquito. Arriving in the colonies through the transatlantic slave trade, malaria had long been endemic in parts of Africa, and many enslaved Africans possessed greater inherited resistance than Europeans or Native Americans. This tragic reality was one reason plantation owners relied so heavily on enslaved labor in the mosquito-infested tobacco fields. British soldiers, lacking prior exposure, suffered devastating illness in the southern swamps, with more than half of Cornwallis’s forces becoming incapacitated.

History reminds us that victories often come through unexpected means. (McNiel JR (2016) Smithsonian Mag)

Steve and Sally Harms

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Walking in Someone Else's Shoes

 Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes

“Within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good. The person who hates you most has some good in him; even the nation that hates you most has some good in it; even the race that hates you most has some good in it.

“And when you come to the point where you look every person in the face and see deep down within what religion calls ‘the image of God,’ you begin to love in spite of. No matter what the person does, you see God’s image there.”—Martin Luther King, Jr., in “Loving Your Enemies,” a sermon at Dexter Ave. Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, 1957.

I once worked with another physician whom I thought was incompetent. I felt her decisions did not make sense and were not helpful. She often spoke almost in riddles, trying to consider many sides of a question, while I already thought there was an obvious answer that, beyond question, was right. Moreover, she was amazingly slow to make any changes.

One weekend, I had to cover her job while she was on vacation. Overnight, I realized why she behaved as she did, the magnitude of her responsibility, and the endless number of real and imagined problems she faced. I walked in her shoes, and it made all the difference.

Placing myself in her shoes helped me see God’s image in her and in others I had previously found difficult to understand.

A story also circulates about someone asking Mother Teresa, “How do you stand it when you have to serve some truly despicable person?” With a sigh, she replies, “I look deeply into their eyes and say to myself, ‘My Jesus, what an interesting disguise you are wearing today.’” – Deborah Sokolove, Seekers Church, “Weekly Gospel Reflection,” Inward/Outward.com, Church of the Saviour.

This is also how Benedictine Spirituality calls us to see others. It is called radical hospitality. We are to look for the light of Christ in others. Often, when we have difficulty with others, it is because we are having trouble finding the light of Christ, our God, within ourselves. We have strayed from our path of staying connected to God in our own lives. We have lost the “light” in our lives that directs us to the light in the lives of others. Having difficulty with others is always a “stop sign” to look for the light of Christ within ourselves and perhaps even to ask someone else for help. Walking in someone else’s shoes is always a good starting point for seeing others in a new light. 

May You Live Long Enough To:

Ricoeur and Anonymous: May You Live Long Enough To:

Guest Writer: Isabel Anders

“I find myself only by losing myself.”—Paul Ricoeur.

“It is always possible to argue against an interpretation, to confront interpretations, to arbitrate among them, and to seek agreement, even if that agreement remains beyond our reach.”—Paul Ricoeur.

Grandmother Whaley and Her Sisters Who Laughed and Cried and Loved

May you live long enough …

To be able to laugh at your most embarrassing moments in the past—sportingly owning the temporary title of “dunce”—before passing it on to the next clown in this dance of win-and-lose, hit-and-miss called “life.”

To side with your former adversaries, if only for a moment—to accept that in certain past disagreements or outright conflicts that have shaped your past: “The other person had a point.”

To realize that even your greatest “triumphs” owe much to outside influences: others’ kind and diligent contributions, the convergence of circumstances, and “sparks” of grace flung from afar that happened to hit you at the moment.

To experience prayer as the automatic breathing of petitions for others’ good—urgently present in your heart before your own needs or requests enter your awareness.

To meet someone whose efforts or example—in any category—put you to “shame,” and to feel the joy that such understanding, expertise, or goodness exists in the world, even without receiving any specific personal gain from it.

To recognize that your “defeats,” by the world’s judgment, were blessings in disguise, checks and balances in the larger arc of your journey toward maturity and self-acceptance.

To feel genuinely sad for people who seemed unfair and cruel to you for no apparent reason, and to lament the conditions that must have made them that way—even when their cruelty caused you genuine pain.

To let go of any idea that we might be able to judge who is worthy or unworthy of anything that comes to them in this life or in the life to come.

“We look not at what can be seen, but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”—2 Corinthians 4:18.

“We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. Hope does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into our hearts. …”—Romans 5:3-5.

Isabel Anders

Author of Circle of Days: A Church Year Primer--Years B and C: A Celebration of the Major Themes and Texts of the Church Year

Year A is out as well!

Joanna   https://www.joannaseibert.com/