Recently my elderly mom had to sell her house. It was difficult for her since she had lived there over 50 years. It was an old one-room, hundred-year-old schoolhouse that she and my dad bought when I was 5. They lived the American dream; renovated, remodeled, worked hard, and made the place their own.
So, so many memories of us working as a family during that process over the years. Soooo much LIFE there. And not just us. Grandparents, cousins, friends—many of them gone now. Holidays, tornadoes, blizzards, card games, ice cream cranking, corn-shucking gatherings. Then there’s the cats, dogs, guinea pigs, pear trees, barns, corn cribs, and the fields and woods which were literally our playgrounds growing up. My husband and I even got married on the back porch. It’s a very wistful, melancholy feeling that sweeps over me as I sit and remember.
I keep thinking how life really is a vapor. We’re here—and then.. we’re gone. ✨ That’s true if we die young and unexpectedly, but also true if we live to be a hundred. It all just goes so fast….
I feel much of that same kind of mournful feeling about America too. To think of what’s happening to this country brings tears to my eyes and a soberness to my heart. The land of the free, the home of the brave, the land of majestic mountains, spacious skies, and rolling hills of grain. I realize that’s idealistic, but I can’t help it, I grew up believing in those ideals, secure in America’s basic goodness and rightness, and feeling anchored and blessed to think myself a part of that.
Was that naive? Maybe.
The ideals she was founded on have shifted. She’s become a land that’s dark and stormy, and doesn’t look like that anymore. Instead of basic underlying goodness, she’s become a land of lies and manipulations; a land where evil men have made themselves God, and where her majestic beauty and goodness now have enormous narcissistic stains of greed, murder and power-mongering upon it.
The Republic in which she stands.. stopped standing.
We the People were once a big-hearted people embracing and helping each other as well as others, but now are a choked and strangled nation living on fear and self-focus and hatred of each other. We have no realization of what we’ve become, and how far we’ve fallen.
But God knows. He sees. And he is a righteous judge. What’s coming, and already here, may not be easy or pleasant in these next years. We’ve prostituted ourselves. We’ve wasted our freedoms and lost our innocence. We’ve taken God’s love for granted. Oh, I know, we sing about him all the time, but the reality is our hearts are hard, and we have little love for anyone but ourselves.
I long for the America that was. The America of my childhood. The America of my naivete. Maybe it was all an illusion; a house of cards, but that high ideal—that was the America I was proud of. I mourn for the darkness she’s become. I mourn for what my grandchildren will face. And I mourn for all the people deceived by all the lies—but also all the ones not deceived, yet who also won’t truly allow Righteousness his rightful place in their hearts. God have mercy on us in the storm.
