Battle Scars

Yesterday I went to Gettysburg for a day trip. Himself is visiting his family, and I hadn't felt well the day before, so I'd cancelled my weekend plans. So a friend and I set out to explore the fabled battlefield a little more in depth than we'd been able to before.

The detailed records that survived the battle provide an unusual opportunity to envision the horror of Gettysburg. With granite, bronze and marble columns, statues, markers and plaques, one can easily see the lines of battle, which historians recreate with startling clarity.

We purchased the CD which narrated the driving tour, and my afternoon was filled with images and sounds of the Civil War. A history nut by nature, I was entranced. I could easily picture the bloody fight in Devil's Den for Little Round Top or the crushing defeat of Pickett's charge on the gentle slopes of Cemetery Ridge. A battle that had long been just words on a page for me came alive.

At the very end of the tour, I felt, for a moment, the intense agony and horrific sadness of the bloody battle, as the narrator spoke of the actions of the Confederate and Union troops at the end of the three-day siege. As Lee's troops were retreating after a humiliating loss and Meade's troops scattered the battlefield nursing wounds and burying the fallen, the sky shook with thunder, the heavens opened and it began to rain.

Sitting in my car, gazing west toward the ridge line where Pickett's advances had begun early on 3 July 1863, I was struck by a thought, "God must have deeply mourned the loss of so many of his sons that day."

Suddenly the stifling heat and humidity didn't seem so brutal as I thought of the battle of Gettysburg in terms of something much bigger. I thought of the more than 50,000 men who were killed, wounded or captured that day. I pictured the beautiful emerald field stained crimson with drying blood. I saw Lee's troops marching very slowly back toward Virginia - heads hung low, throats burning, eyes stinging with unshed tears. I thought of Meade's troops, remaining on the battlefield surrounded with thousands of dead enemies, friends, brothers. I saw that they too moved very slowly - pausing to remember a fallen comrade, bending to tend to a wounded ally - all the time holding their breaths against the acrid stench of gunpowder and death, swallowing hard to keep from retching and crying out. Then I thought of their mothers and wives, days later, receiving word of the battle - clasping a hand to their mouths to stifle a silent scream, tears glistening on their sun-kissed cheeks as they wondered if the anxious young men they'd sent off to fight would ever come home. And I saw, in that brief mention of the storm that washed the physical evidence of the battle from the blades of grass, the tears of God.

I was amazed at the amount of emotion that miles of still-preserved grass and farmland could evoke. I was even more surprised by my own reaction to it - that my first thought was of the deep pain God must have felt as he surely watched his sons battle over what each felt right for the divinely designed promised land. For a brief second, I wondered if He had to turn his head, to wipe his eyes, to bite his lip to keep himself from reaching out and stopping the slaughter that was both senseless and necessary. I wondered if it was anything remotely like the horror he must have felt the night His Son was nailed to a cross on Calvary, as He then too had to turn away and withdraw His spirit in order to save the rest of His children.

I realized just how much the hand of Providence touches our lives every day. I glimpsed, for a brief second, what a terrible burden the follies and sins of man must be, even for the divine. I ached at the thought that, while I have been far removed from the battles of men like Gettysburg, I too contributed to the burden in Gethsemane - my own small burden so great I couldn't bear it myself, but instead accepted the Gift of an atoning sacrifice. In effect, I was humbled at the lessons learned on a searing hot summer day in rural Pennsylvania.