The Spiritual Abraham Lincoln

YOU HAVE READ THE RAVE REVIEWS…NOW ENJOY THIS ENTIRE FIRST CHAPTER OF THE BOOK… Many seed ideas FOR TALKS …His 200th birthday is coming up in 2009 and will be celebrated all across the nation.

THE SPIRITUAL ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Chapter 1

IN THE BEGINNING

One day the second child of Thomas and Nancy Hank Lincoln would become the president of what many have called and continue to call, the Promised Land. However, anyone voicing such a thought on the day of his birth, the twelfth of February 1809, would have been laughed at and told by any backwoods listener that he didn’t have a possums chance. Picture this future president growing up dirt poor with a shirt made of bear skins, a coonskin hat and dreams of something better than what was offered. The one room notched log cabin in Hardin County Kentucky certainly wasn’t much of a springboard for success.
He was named after his paternal granddaddy and Abraham in the Bible. Though the Biblical Abraham was certainly a leader, our Abe achieved leadership not because he was born to it, but because somewhere along the line he decided he would rather lead than be led.
His mother often rested the family Bible in her lap as she recited its stories to little Abe and his sister Sarah. A younger brother Thomas died at birth. With love and affection Lincoln said of her, “God bless my mother. All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to her.” He never stopped reading his Bible, which is why so many of his speeches were peppered with Scripture.

Through much of his youth was certainly an isolated existence, there was a period when their home was on the main road from Louisville to Nashville. Running right by their cabin door, it gave Lincoln the advantage of countless meetings with multi-thinking travelers. By the time the family moved again, when he was seven, he had to have listened scads of times to discussions about how government could, and needed to, improve on the shakiness of land ownership because of uncertain boundaries, high interest rates and slavery.
It was during this same time that America nearly lost its future president before they lost him to an assassination. He almost drowned in a creek. But it didn’t happen. He was needed down the road for greater things.
Unfortunately, when Abe was only nine his mother died of milk fever, as did many in that time. His widowed father soon married again and if one had to have a stepmother, Lincoln could have done no better than Sally Bush. This woman, who for the rest of his life he referred to as his angel mother, did all she could to encourage his father to look more kindly on his love of learning. It was an exercise in futility for Tom Lincoln considered such bookish behavior a waste of time. This was how Abe came to regard his father’s occupational choices.
Having two such remarkable mothers who so greatly influenced this gangling youth could almost be called providential.

The Opportunity of a formal education for young Abe was close to nil. One time they lived eighteen miles from a school. That was a lot of walking between the family farm and the one room schoolhouse he called his learning home. It is one of the reasons that over his childhood he had a little less than a year’s worth of actual schooling.
Because there were no books, everything was learned by rote, hence the nickname Blab Schools. Abe liked to repeat things over and over so he would never forget them, saying such as:

“Live in your youth so you will not have to be ashamed in your old age.”
“Coward never start, the weak never finish.”
“You can get more with an ounce of honey than a gallon of gall.”

He tried always to live by these and other early learned school house maxims.
Nor was paper readily available. During these brief winter sessions, he would practice his lessons the dirt or snow.
Chasing after a good book like a dog after a rabbit, he would sometimes walk as far as twenty miles to borrow one. It was said that from the ave of twelve he never went anywhere without a beloved book tucked beneath his arm. Lincoln began to develop a list of favorites: Aesop’s Fables, thought provoking Pilgrim’s Progress, the works of William Shakespeare, The life of George Washington, and the biographies of Ben Franklin.
One section in particular in Pilgrim’s Progress heaving influenced his thinking. Ignorance is walking with two pilgrims and says, “My heart is as good as any man’s heart…as to my thoughts, I take no notice of them.”
Many of his friends chose ignorance and could neither read nor write. He was known to comment that they were not too dumb to learn, but rather too lazy. “Some,” he said, “were so lazy they couldn’t have raised a good stink even if they were a skunk,.” I can easily imagine Lincoln, with sadness for their lack of discipline, quoting Proverbs, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”
It is one thing to know what should be done. It is always something else to do it. Surmise then that his Bible knowledge offered motivation thoughts such as “Wisdom is the principal thing, therefore get wisdom and with all thy getting get understanding.”
Part of his education would today be called survival school As in all pioneer families, the possibility of disaster was never far away. There were no guarantees when a farmer walked out his door come morning time that he would come back though that same door when dusk arrived. Abe once killed a hundred snakes no more than a hoot and a holler from the family doorstep.
The thick, dark woods held bears ready to attack and Indians to scalp. Homesteaders early learned to sometimes walk backwards rather than forwards. That way, an Indian up to no good, coming upon footprints on the forest floor, would be confused as to which was his intended victim might be going. Even in church every man had a rifle by his side while others outside stood guard.
With little knowledge of sanitation, no corner drugstore with remedies for infection, pre-natal care non-existent and even ill-prepared doctors scant, it is little wonder his boyhood was filled with superstitious saying. Indeed, at any gathering, folk would more often than not share what they considered medical tidbits: steal a dishrag – kill a wart. Skip a row when you plant and there’ll be a death in the family. Or, if a horse breathes on your child it’s get whooping cough. As late as 1859, if a doctor-to-be attended medical school at all, he had covered the entire store of existing medical lore in one year.
However, there was never a shortage of courageous dreamers who might die young, but, as more than one would proclaim, “I’ll die wilderness free.” It wasn’t that any self-reliant pioneer wanted complete loneliness. It was that he expressed a desire for more moving-around-in space by saying, “Don’t mind a neighbor as long as he’s not too close. But if I can stand in my front door and see smoke rising from his cabin, he’s too close.”
The question of slavery traveled with these new pioneers who were not men and women shy with their opinions nor reticent in their responses. One Lincoln historian has suggested that his lifetime dislike of slavery stemmed from having been, to a large degree, a slave to his father. Whenever there was any time not needed to work on their own property, his father would hire him out to a neighbor and keep the money for himself. Every muscle in Abe’s boy got a daily working over that might have killed some lesser men. He had no idea what lay beyond time’s horizon, but he definitely knew he did not want it to be farming.
Because Abe was always more than persistent toward rightness, just before he finally left home he helped build one more family log cabin. It was finished four days after his twenty-first birthday, and then he left. God had work for him to do.


Chapter 2

THE MAKING OF THE MAN

Who was Lincoln, the man? We have had well over a century to try to answer that question and are still overwhelmed by the task for he fits into no convenient mold. When Lincoln was born, what did God have in mind? What did his Lord want him to be? All the hours he spent in church listening to sermons certainly had their influence. In all his decisions when he was president, he must have been guided by a Jesus who did not just look at the Via Dolorosa, but walked it. Who did not just partake of the Last Supper, but served it. Abe’s Biblical learning must have underlined the thought that prayers must be more than just the turning of a prayer wheel. There is no record of his first heavenly appeal, but it is well established that he believed prayers is a conduit that can read the the heart of God……………………………………..
Neil’s 10th book Letters to 21st Century America From Charles Wesley, Hymn Writer Supreme is being published by CSS publisher in the near future.
Thanks to those of you who have been sending this to friends and have shared with me you have.

The Spiritual Abraham Lincoln

by Neil WyrickClick To Order

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