(Note: We're following the Old Testament lections, but this week's Gospel lesson offered the opportunity for a timely word, so here's a bonus "Sermoneutics" at no extra charge!)
T.
J. Jackson was one of history’s greatest generals – when he was awake.
His
brigade stood like a stone wall at First Manassas. He bedeviled the Yankees
throughout the Shenandoah Valley in a campaign that military tacticians still
study. He swept the blue-bellies from the field at Fredericksburg and turned
the Union lines at Chancellorsville.
And
he stumbled through the Seven Days Battle like a somnambulist.
Throughout
the week of battles that wound up the Peninsula Campaign Jackson failed to show
up at crucial moments, issued contradictory orders and failed to follow up on
initial victories. In the end the legendary timidity of Yankee commander George
McClellan, who followed both victory and defeat by retreating, allowed Robert
E. Lee to scrounge a victory and run the enemy away from Richmond, but the
Johnnies missed many opportunities for decisive triumph.
Historian
Ben Cleary offers an interesting explanation of Jackson’s uncharacteristic
behavior: He stayed up past his bedtime. Sleep deprivation, claims Cleary,
explains what cowardice or craziness could not. Some experts estimate that
Stonewall got a total of ten hours of sleep over the four days that preceded the
week of fighting. At one point Jackson dozed off at the officer’s mess with a
half-munched crust of hardtack between his teeth.
“Like his men,” Cleary writes, Jackson “believed he could ‘stand
almost anything.’ He couldn't. Jackson may have relied on his will to push
himself beyond the limits of human endurance, but those limits are very real,
and he encountered them in the hot, swampy lowlands east of Richmond in the
summer of 1862.”
"Come away by yourselves to a secluded place and rest a
while." Or in the lovely old King James, “Come ye yourselves apart into a
desert place, and rest a while.” To which the crusty evangelist Vance Havner
once remarked, “If you don’t come apart, you will come apart!”
Come
apart, before you encounter your limits in the hot, swampy lowlands of illness
and depression. Come apart, before your courage fails in the face of a fleeing
foe. Come apart, before you nod off with the half-eaten body of Christ between
your teeth and the torches of the enemy picking their way through the darkness
of your private Gethsemane.
The “Rest” of the
Story
Doug
No comments:
Post a Comment