Hello everyone! My family and I had a great time in Philadelphia and Washington D.C. Along with my sister and her family, we were able to celebrate my parents 50th wedding anniversary by spending time together and experiencing American history in museums and a day at Mount Vernon.

Everywhere we turned, we were reminded that this year is America’s 250th birthday. We saw the room the Declaration of Independence was signed, along with the document itself. We were reminded of tension between beliefs about the rights of humanity to be free written by slave owners. Even then, good Americans disagreed on this issue. We saw how the American military became forged through the struggle of the winter they spent at Valley Forge. Yet, after that winter, George Washington had a pruned army who was disciplined and tough enough to take on the British forces. We took some time to go to Gettysburg to see how the tension of keeping the Union in tact during the Civil War costs so many American lives. Soldiers on both sides fought for their perception of liberty, as the issue of states’ rights regarding chattel slavery was a major point of debate. The struggle for freedom is baked into our history. Washington D.C. holds museum after museum of our continued struggle to forge a more perfect nation, our art, our innovation and artifacts of the wars we have fought in the world to keep our freedom or help others keep theirs. After five or six days, and a lot of ice cream, our kids understandably started to loose interest in drinking from the fire hydrant of history we were encountering.

This made me think about the book of Acts, our Churches history. It might be easy to read the book of Acts and see all their wins, but the church has always grown in the midst of struggle. They were trying to figure out how to be this Spiritual Body led by Jesus just as we are today. Yet, just like we have grown as a country through struggle, so the Church today will have struggles. It is easy to get tired, complacent, and take the path of least resistance. It would have been easier for our country to not experience a winter at Valley Forge, or fight to end slavery and preserve the Union. It would have been easier for Peter to go away and preach in the country side, not stay in the city of Jerusalem where opposition arose. But the Church has something that no government could ever generate, a weapon that no army could ever procure. It is the Holy Spirit which keeps the Church throughout the ages, not human intuition, strength or grit. What a blessing to live here in America, with all the good and bad dynamics of our history. But what a hope we have in our heavenly citizenship, the resurrected Christ holds His Church which will continue on when the American experiment has ended. Come this Sunday as we let our souls be encouraged by the history of His People.

Rev. Ben Melli