[Faith-talk] Daily Thought for Saturday, September 13, 2014

[Paul]

Hello and good day to you all on this Saturday or, for you in Australia and New Zealand, a very early Sunday morning.  I hope that this finds you all well, by God's matchless grace and His providential care.

With apologies to those of you who don't live here in the U.S., I'd like to commemmorate in a small way the Battle of Baltimore, Fort McHenry and North Point in a Christian sort of way.  For those of you who know the territory, I just learned yesterday that some outposts of the British camp were positioned less than four miles from where I live right now.  Will give you locals more particulars if interested.

What I'd like to do now is to copy for you the words of the fourth verse of our national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner," because, in my humble opinion, the words place the outcome of the battle fairly and squarely where they belong.  Most Americans, I submit, probably have never read the words, much less those from other nations.  So for all here are the words to the fourth verse written by Francis Scott Key:

O thus be it ever when free men shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war's desolation;
Blest the vict'ry and peace, may the heav'n-rescued land
Praise the Pow'r that hath made and preserving us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just;
And this be our motto:  "In God is our trust!"
And the Star-spangled Banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And there you have it.  Now I realize that the "land of the free" unfortunately didn't apply then to black slaves and possibly other minorities, but at the time of this writing more than likely this wasn't considered.

Besides being a lawyer, Francis Scott Key wrote more than a few hymns that were sung during worship services in the Episcopal Church to which he was a communicant.  Some of you literary types might have heard of the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Well, his great-uncle was none other than Key himself.  In Baltimore there's a monument to him, but won't give out the location as most of you couldn't picture that, but for you locals I'll gladly give the location.

And that will do it for today.  Don't forget that, tomorrow we will have our weekly Bible trivia game-poem, so have your biblical thinking caps prepared.  And now may the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob just keep us safe, individually and collectively, in these last days in which we live.  Your Christian friend and brother, Paul