The Peak of Inspiration

A few days ago, we visited a Civil War battlefield.  We had the place more or less to ourselves.  We walked through the museum which displayed the various weapons of warfare and how this particular battle had been fought.  We took a self-guided auto tour around the battlefield itself and visited a few different sites of interest.  There was the farmhouse turned field hospital.  The spots where the artillery had been positioned.  The creek, the telegraph line, the hill called “Bloody Hill” where the heaviest fighting took place.  It was all very peaceful now.  Beautiful even.  No hint of the fear, agony, pain and sweat that must surely have been there on that day in 1861.  It had been replaced with a profound quiet and sense of reverence.  So much so that it was difficult to imagine what took place that day. 

That experience has drawn my mind to some other battlefields that I have visited, some of them more than once.  They are also silent.  They too contain artifacts and traces of the fight.  I have read about the battles.  I have seen the weapons that were used.  And when I walk across those grounds, a sense of peace and reverence accompanies me. 

A couple of years ago I picked up and browsed through my grandma’s Bible.  Lots of highlighted verses, notes and quotes.  It told the story of a lifelong struggle.  It displayed the weapons she used against the things trying to win her soul.  It gave me a little glimpse into the battlefield of her heart.  A battlefield that is now silent.

This past year I have had numerous opportunities to stroll the grounds of another battlefield.  I walk over the seven acres that is the old home place, and I think about the man that poured his sweat and blood out to hold that hill.  I can only imagine most of the battles that he must have fought.  A few of them I witnessed myself.

During the years of my late childhood and early teens, we had a small hog operation.  A lot of lessons were learned out there but one in particular stands out in my memory.  Dad was an unusually patient man, but a pregnant sow is unusually belligerent.  One day it got too much.  That old sow got the best of the patient man and he wasn’t kind to her.  It looked for a moment like the evil side would gain an advantage.  The next morning during family devotions, that ground was regained.  Dad told us he was sorry for the way he had responded.  The enemy took a heavy loss that day.

We had a neighbor whose farm bordered ours.  He decided to retire and offered that dad could farm some of his ground.  This was exactly what dad needed at the time.  A very ideal situation.  The right amount of land in the right spot, at the right time.  But at the last moment, the offer was retracted.  The neighbor had heard a rumor about dad and that, combined with an offer from another very successful farmer in the area, was enough to for him to call it all off.  The circumstances being what they were, it was a difficult attack to counter.  I remember where I was sitting when he told of winning that battle.  He didn’t win it by conventional methods.   And it wasn’t painless.  But he drove the enemy off the field. 

You can say I’m just being sentimental.  That I’m walking down memory’s lane.  Or maybe that I’m lost in the past and not living in the present.  But I think I’m just visiting a battlefield.  I’m trying to learn what weapons to use, and what tactics the enemy might use on me.  When to defend my position and when to advance.  I’m studying the old war heroes, letting them school me in this warfare that is Christian life.

Because the battle is real.  Evil wants your heart.  It wanted my grandmother’s heart.  It wanted my dad’s.  

Walk the quiet roads.  Get lost in those peaceful hills.  And listen.  Those silent battlefields have a voice.  Let it guide you.  And fight on.

And when the battle’s over, we shall wear a crown…  Isaac Watts