Many Have Forgotten

    The children of Israel came out of 450 years of desperate slavery
at the hands of the Egyptian Pharaohs.  They were delivered by some of
the greatest miracles that God has ever done, but still they weren't
content.  They all too quickly forgot what God had done for them.  It
took them 40 years to make the 11 day journey from Egypt to Palestine.

    They were settled in a land of milk and honey.  A land rich in
every thing that they needed to live a life of plenty.  Those that
Nebuchadnezzer of Babylon did not kill, were hamstrung and their eyes
poked out and once again taken into slavery.  They again forgot.

    After 70 years they regained their freedom and were allowed to go
back into their homeland.  But some years later.  The Roman Legions
entered Palestine and made them a slave state.  They cried out again
to God for a deliverer.  Once again a good and loving God sent them
one.  They killed Him.  In 70 A.D., after the death of Jesus, they
were driven to the four winds to be without a homeland for the next
2,000 years.  They had forgotten.

    After this brief summary of Biblical history, my point is that it
seems that we too have forgotten.  I was born in 1944 during the
closing days of World War II and I grew up on stories of how tough it
was when during the days of the Great Depression and the of the Dust
Bowl and of Ration Coupons to keep "our boys" in the battles of Europe
and the Pacific.

    I grew up hearing the stories of hunger and privation on the
battlefields or barb-wired camps where P.O.W.'s existed on a skimpy
gruel of turnips or potatoes.  Of cold C-Rations and bathing in
helmets.

    Today we have been so blessed and care so little, that I can only
come to the conclusion that we have forgotten.  It seems like we no
longer know what it is to have children with bowed legs due to rickets
or the gray skin of malnutrition or have to stuff newspaper into
ragged shoes to walk miles to school or work in the cotton fields in
100 + weather.  Eating cold beans with no pork, or baking soda
biscuits made with water on the sides of the field.

    In our wealth, we have now shoved these memories to the back of
our minds.  We celebrate them in ways that are to our shame.  We have
a bean dinner cornbread for a church dinner, and boast about having
been there, but forget all the while that there are others who are
still there.

    In Matthew 25:42-45 Jesus said, "For I was hungry and you gave Me
no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; I was a stranger and
you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in
prison and you did not visit Me."  Now really, did you forget?

Frank Cooke