Hey, everyone!
I’m so pumped!
And I know you are too!
Only ONE MORE DAY ’til the big day!
Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday!
What more could we say about him?
Our tallest President! (6’ 4”! With size 14 shoes!)
A President who as a self-taught lawyer once argued before the United States Supreme Court! (He lost!)
He is the only President with a patent for an invention he invented
(I guess that’s the only kind of inventions there are!)
He’s the only Prez inducted into the Wrestling Federation Hall of Fame!
And he was hilarious at times!
He’s famous for so many things, but his humor is at the top of the list!
“His world-wide reputation for telling anecdotes – and telling them so well,” recalled friend Joshua Speed “was in my judgement necessary to his very existence.”
He mostly told jokes to feel better himself.
But he did tell jokes about himself!
Once a woman was so upset with him that she said he was “two-faced”.
The famously homely Chief Exec answered, “Ma’m, if I had two faces, do you think I’d be wearing this one??”
For such a jovial and hilarious guy, our amazing 16th President had some sad times . Once he wrote his friend at the beginning of 1841, “I am the most miserable man living. If what I felt were distributed to the whole human family there would not be one cheerful face on the earth…”
Some think he told jokes so much just to cheer himself up!
After a good one, his heart would sigh, “Ahhh! That feels awesome!”
Because President Lincoln was so famous for his million jokes he’d tell, in his honor…
on the day before his “Big Day”…
I thought I’d begin this email with a few of my own…
Did you hear they arrested the old British lady from the Great British Bake-off Show?
Must’ve been serious!
They interrogated her for 30 minutes!
At 375 degrees!
Speaking of food, do you know what they call root beer served in a squared mug?
It’s just beer!
(That is a math joke I don’t fully understand it but I know it’s good one!)
“Hey! Do you know my neighbor?”
“I think so…”
“Well, he’s in the Guinness Book of World Records! Has the world record for concussions! He’s had 44!”
“Which neighbor are you talking about?”
“You know! The one just a stone’s throw down the road.”
Y’know, I’ve never understood what’s so great about Switzerland…Altho’ their flag’s a big plus!
Did you hear about the chicken that got smushed by a car trying to cross the street?
Finally got to the other side!*
(*Note:This joke is theologically inaccurate. Chickens will NOT be on the other side. And according to Revelation 22:15, the theological debate about dogs is still open!)
But President Lincoln had a very serious side as well.
As he grew older he grew serious about his search for God
Lots of people said, “Ol’ Abe Lincoln weren’t no Christian. Couldna been! “
“Why, he was the only President that never belonged to a church!”…
“He wrote that blasphemous pamphlet trying to disprove the Bible when he was young and just running for Congress…”
“Told off-colored jokes now-and-again…Thought they were funny, too! Laughed harder than anyone thar!”
“Couldna been! Just couldna!”
Except that…even with all that being true…
Lincoln read the Bible everyday. He knew whole chapters by heart.
As a young person, he had really rejected the Christianity of his father.
It seemed harsh and mean.
Just like his dad.
But when his son Eddie died in 1850, the pastor who helped his family through their dark sorrow was a Presbyterian who had written a book with a ponderous title which was shortened to “A Defense of the Christian Faith” explaining rationally and reasonably why faith in the Risen Christ is rational and reasonable. While taking time to mourn Eddie in Lexington Ky, Mary Todd’s brother said that Lincoln read the 650-page work and told him that he had come to believe in “the truthfulness of the Christian religion”
He attended the New York Ave Presbyterian Church in Washington as President every Sunday he was in town (and even went to prayer on Wednesday!) and when the pastor, Phineas Gurley, a deep and godly theologian from whom Lincoln often sought spiritual counsel, wisdom and guidance, would pray…
Abraham would always…with head bowed…stand.
All six feet, four inches.
And on March 4, 1865, he gave his second inaugural address on the steps of our Capital.
Only 704 words.
Of these, 505 were one syllable words.
Twenty five sentences in four paragraphs.
It took less than seven minutes to speak.
George Washington in his inaugural, vaguely alluded to God as the “Parent of the human race’…
John Adams mentioned the “Patron of order”…
John Quincey Adams was the only President who had ever quoted one single verse of the Bible in his inaugural address…
But Lincoln, after his introduction, in the less than 400 words remaining quoted four Scriptures, and spoke of the “Living God”, prayer, the will of God, and the purposes of God…thirteen times!
At the war’s victorious end, when he could have pounded his chest like a blitzing free safety making the game-changing sack, he instead spoke of the mysterious purposes of God in allowing the war in its unanticipated severity.
“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other…. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully.
The Almighty has His own purposes…”
God could not be on both opposing side at the same time.
Perhaps…
Perhaps, He was doing something far more profound.
Perhaps, he suggested it was the judgment of God on everyone for “…the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil…until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword…”
He had thought these thoughts before…
After Lincoln was dead, his assistant John Hay found in his personal journal an entry…a previously undiscovered thought that he had written to himself…for himself only…about what the will of God could have been in allowing the war to come…
It was dated September, 1862 just after the devastating defeat at Second Bull Run.
Shhh…Listen…Someone no one would have expected, is meditating on God’s will…
“The will of God prevails. In great contests, each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. ... I am almost ready to say this is probably true -- that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet -- By his mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants…He could give the final victory to either side any day -- Yet the contest proceeds…”
Who would have known that in his secret heart, before he testified it to all the world, Abraham Lincoln believed in the deep purposes of the living God to humble His people before Him…
He ended his seven golden minutes with this…
“…With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Malice toward none…
charity (an old word meaning love) for all…
cherishing a just and lasting peace…
among ourselves…
and with all the world…
Wow.
And…Amen!
