Homeward Bound

Obedience is a difficult thing for us humans. It is one thing for us to love someone who is being difficult; it is another to get to a place where we even WANT to love that difficult person in the first place. Some days are just not good days. You know what I am talking about, those days where even the littlest things set us off. Where people bother us, and we don't worry about bothering them back.   For days like these, C S Lewis offers some wise advice.      "The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less." (Lewis, Mere Christianity, 131)   ...

After three months of reading, I completed McPherson’s famous work “Battle Cry of Freedom”. It took me this long to complete not because the reading was laborious, but because of the sheer volume of material in this book. Information is packed on every page—and not just military information. McPherson captures life for the average citizen in both the Confederacy and the Union. He tracks the economic implications of the war, the foreign implications of the war, the political rollercoaster throughout the war, the desperation of the Union in 1862, and the shambles of the Confederacy in 1864-1865. This is perhaps the best work on the most turbulent period of American History: The Civil War. McPherson reveals with great detail, the massive divide between the North and the South generations before the Civil War. The Civil War was not a flippant affair by the South. Secession was threatened years before and seemed only a matter of time before it would come to fruition. Though there are many ...