Mount Vernon and Monticello or Calvary

I put about 800 miles on our car over the weekend on a trip to Mount Vernon. A few weeks ago it was Monticello. Behind the wheel of an automobile is one of my favorite places to be for I can listen to radio, a talking book or just meditate. All this for about ten cents a mile or ten cents a minute. What is going on in the minds of these thousands of people that I came in close proximity to? For most, it was probably the days work or the coming, or just completed, vacation. Maybe it was a little bit different for the people in line at the homesteads of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson? Maybe they too felt the necessity to go back in time, to get a clue as to how we came to be where we are today as a nation? Maybe my thinking was not so much alien to some of these folks.  We stopped for a little while in Gettysburg on the trip back. It's very likely that the common thread of thinking in America will change in the very near future for we are in trouble and have brought that trouble upon ourselves. The sermon from the church that we visited today was on the love of God. Now this topic is usually fodder for liberal Christian pulpits that use God's love as an excuse to ignore everything else that God is...but not today. This Baptist pastor, I am Presbyterian, took great pains in describing that love, a love that should be completely incomprehensible to us....that is if we truly know ourselves. You did this for ....me? Why...?  How could you love me...even now after I profess you as My God, my Savior? I don't even love me! But He does! He does! The ubiquitous words God bless America do not relate to our love of God but to our love for America. God bless this land that we love, but what have we done that proves that we love this land? We build our own lives and our own houses as America decays and God's house lay in ruins, and we cast aside his architectural plans at that. We rush home from church, ignore the rest of the Lord's Day, and immediately pursue our own pleasures yet have the gall to say "God bless America" in the time we allot to discussion of the newspaper's headlines. We came to be the nation that we are today because our love to God had long since grown cold. He has been long-suffering and given us ample time to return to Him but we closed our ears....and now we find ourselves in the predicament that we are in....or rather we will soon find that out. So I travelled back in time this weekend, not two centuries but twenty centuries to be reminded that if America is to survive it will be because we will have come to show love to God, not America.