Every now and then I have to do a mic check for the tech team.

Usually people say “check, check, check, one, two, three.” Not me. I use these words…

“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.”

I had to memorize the Gettysburg Address in the sixth grade! Therefore, I try to put that task to good use and remember these famous words as often as I can.

It is hard to imagine the ferocity of the fighting, that went on there on the first three days of July 1863, but it’s not difficult to picture the scene on July 4, “four score and seven years: following the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

On the Fourth of July, the day following the battle, Gen. Robert E. Lee and what was left of his army began their return to Virginia. Confederate casualties numbered twenty thousand, many of them incurred in Pickett’s famous charge up Cemetery Ridge. The high ground occupied by the North had been an advantage; still, Union losses numbered eighteen thousand, and though Gen. George S. Meade followed Lee’s troops south, it could not have been with great enthusiasm. The battle had left both sides exhausted and discouraged.

A little more than four months later, President Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg to dedicate the battlefield to the soldiers who had paid the ultimate price. Though he told those gathered there that “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,” he was wrong. His words still ring like the bell that first sounded liberty in Phiadelphia. Historians note that the speech he wrote in Washington and revised on the train was not the same as the one he delivered.

His spoken speech included two words, “under God.” That significant phrase came in the final sentence of his address: “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 and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

We must be reminded often that a nation cannot be under God until the people are under God. People can never be forced to be under God by their government. However, when people live their lives under God they become salt and light to their government.

I hope you have a great 250th celebration of the Fourth of July!!

This is my story…