I am not a political blogger, so I
try to stay in my lane when I’m writing this blog. However, today is Election
Day in a year when the campaign process has been loud, long, and bitter.
I am not going to tell you who to
vote for, but I am going to tell you to vote.
After reading David McCullough's John Adams a few months ago, I was so moved that I pressed on and read his book, 1776.
Above pictures from Colonial Williamsburg and Faneuil Hall in Boston taken during our 7,000 mile cross country adventure, Dream Summer. Read more HERE. 
In the book, he quotes Loyalist
Benjamin Thompson as saying that George Washington’s army was “the most
wretchedly clothed, and as dirty a set of mortals as ever disgraced the name of
a soldier.” McCullough wrote that Thompson’s description was “largely the
truth.” British commanders called them “peasantry” and “rabble in arms.”
There were no uniforms unless
left over from the French and Indian war, and many of their clothes were in tatters
from wear. McCullough says, yes, they were dirty and “when not drilling, spent their days digging
trenches, hauling rock, and throwing up great mounds of earth for defense” with
“little chance . . . or the means ever to bathe . . .”
As I read, I wondered again how that
ragged bunch ever won the revolution. It seemed impossible.
That summer of 1776, when the
British armada finally arrived off Staten Island, it numbered “nearly four hundred
ships large and small, seventy three warships including eight ships of the
line, each mounting 50 guns or more . . . the largest expeditionary force . . .
ever sent forth from Britain or any nation.” Three of the “five warships alone
far exceeded all the American guns . . . on shore.” In fact, the troops on
board those ships numbered around 32,000, greater than the “population of New
York or even Philadelphia . . . with a population of about 30,000 . . . the
largest city in America.”
Yet, when the delegates in
Philadelphia had voted to “dissolve the connection” with Great Britain on July
2, there was nowhere to go but forward. They had committed treason.
John Adams wrote, “We are in the
very midst of a revolution, the most complete unexpected and remarkable of any
in the history of nations.”
Indeed.
In his last chapter, McCullough writes,
“The year 1776 . . . was for those who carried the fight for independence
forward a year of all too few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment,
defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear, as they would never forget, but also
of phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country, and that, too, they
would never forget.”
Perhaps, that bedrock devotion
is why when I look at my family genealogy, a number of my ancestors from that
time were named after Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Parents wanted everyone
to know whose side they were on, lest anyone question their loyalty to country.
McCullough concludes, “. . . for
those who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the
beginning―the outcome seemed little short of a miracle.”
Yes, our existence as a country
is truly a miracle. So today in the year 2016, despite whatever struggle we’ve
had in this election process, we cannot dismiss the freedom we have to vote. Many
of our ancestors fought and died so that we might have this privilege.
And as a wayside pulpit near me
declared, despite who is elected president, God is still on the throne.
“Blessed is the nation whose God
is the Lord . . . “ Psalm 13:12.