At the beginning of this week, I asked why we start each day honoring our country.  We considered that America is only great if she is good, that our happiness depends on humility and our liberty upon personal virtue, and that true patriotism is to love our country like our family, even when she is not so great.

But there is a danger in thinking that it is all up to us.

In the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation—not of Thanksgiving, not of emancipation, but of humiliation—and he reminded us of this ever-present danger.  He said:

“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.”

And that is why, even before we honor our country, we start each school day with the words: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon thee…” 

And now, for the Friday Funnies:

A burglar broke into a home and was looking around. He heard a soft voice say, “Jesus is watching you”. Thinking it was just his imagination, he continued his search. Again the voice said “Jesus is watching you”. He turned his flashlight around and saw a parrot in a cage. He asked the parrot if he was the one talking and the parrot said, “yes.” He asked the parrot what his name was and the parrot said, “Moses.” The burglar asked, “what kind of people would name a parrot Moses?” The parrot said, “the same kind of people who would name their German Shepherd Jesus”.