TERRE HAUTE —
Way back when (I’m talking waaaay back: Kennedy was president!) my family and I took a trip to Washington, D.C. We visited the museums and monuments and even the Capital and the White House. While touring the White House, I think my father must have thought I was going to sneak home one of Mary Lincoln’s vases or that great painting of Dolley Madison saving George Washington’s half-finished portrait during the War of 1812. All I know is that when we entered the State Dining Room, Dad was holding onto my hand so tightly I was about to lose circulation in my fingers.
Then, Dad pointed to the mantel and whispered to me, “See that? We need to pray that, too.” Then I read those words of John Adams: “I pray Heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this House, and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.”
That is an appropriate prayer for these upcoming weeks. Neither should we forget, nor let anyone else forget, things that were said by some of those who were ruling under the White House roof.
Theodore Roosevelt said: “Every thinking man, when he thinks, realizes that the teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and intertwined with our whole civic and social life that it would be, literally, I do not mean figuratively, but literally impossible for us to figure what the loss would be if these teachings were removed. We would lose all the standards by which we now judge both public and private morals; all the standards toward which we, with more or less resolution, strive to raise ourselves.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower said: “Without God, there could be no American form of government, no American way of life. Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first, the most basic expression of Americanism.”
And on Aug. 23, 1984, Ronald Reagan said: “Without God, there is no virtue, because there’s no prompting of the conscience. Without God, we’re mired in the material, that flat world that tells us only what our senses perceive. Without God, there is a coarsening of the society. And without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure. If we ever forget that we are one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.”
Romans 13:1 says: “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.”
This is all food for thought (and prayer) in the upcoming days and weeks. Let us remember the words of Abraham Lincoln: “I have been driven many times to my knees with the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.”
In this confusing election, there is nowhere else for us to go but to our God, the Savior of us all. Let us fall to our knees, asking for God’s guidance and leading.
And may God continue to bless America.
Verna Davis, speaker and writer, maybe reached at vrdspeaks@yahoo.com.
Religion
THE JOY LADY: Let us fall to our knees, asking for God’s guidance
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