Day Nineteen

Do you remember how last Sunday when we went to Church in Conway we met someone who knew someone that both Mike and I knew in high school.  Well, this week, in the Gettysburg Ward, we actually met someone we knew.  What a small world it is among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.   We sat down in the back pews of the chapel today and a young man came up and said I think I knew you. He was a young man who had served a mission in our ward in late 2011 and just returned home in Feburary.  We knew him then as Elder Cook.  Today he spoke in the ward we attended as Joel Cook.  It was great to see him, and he gave an awesome talk! 

In the afternoon we drove around the Gettysburg Battlefield.  We had a CD that described the scene and told the happenings of each day.  The battle raged for three days and left over 50,000 plus casualties including 7,000 horse who were killed.  It is hard to envision this peaceful land strewn with bodies of men of horses.

There are over 1300 memorials placed on the land to honor those who fought.  Some are plain and simple and others are huge works of art. 

We ended the tour in the Gettysburg Military Cemetery where Abraham Lincoln gave his famous speech.  The keynote speaker who spoke before him gave a two hour speech.  And then President Lincoln spoke for two minutes.  Two minutes that will be remembered for all of time. 

The Gettysburg Memorial site of President Lincoln's famous Gettysburg address.

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."