“What did you think about Abraham Lincoln?” I asked my grandson as we were walking out of the visitor center at the Lincoln birthplace in Hodgenville, Ky.
Eli was barely 5 years old at the time. He needed someone to care for him on Fridays, because pre-school was available only Monday through Thursday. I volunteered, since that was typically my day off. I dubbed Friday, “Eli and PopPop Day,” and so we took off on various excursions in our neck of the woods, Central Kentucky.
That particular Friday, we had been to the first Lincoln Memorial, a National Historical Park. As we walked into the visitor center, I pointed to a statue of Lincoln. “That’s Abraham Lincoln,” I emphasized to Eli. “He was a great man, and a long time ago, President of the United States.” Then, we went inside, watched a video about Lincoln, and viewed displays relative to Lincoln’s life and time.
It was as we were exiting that I posed that question to Eli: “Well, what did you think about Abraham Lincoln?”
Eli didn’t answer; I could tell he was pondering.
“It’s a terrible thing,” he finally said, as if he were coming to a measured conclusion, having given serious thought to the matter.
Thinking he was sad that Lincoln had been assassinated, or that he had grown up in such difficult times, or that he had faced such severe hardship in trying to preserve the union of the United States, I asked Eli specifically what was troubling him: “What was the terrible thing that happened to Lincoln?”
“Well, PopPop,” Eli said, as if the answer was obvious, “he turned into that statue.”
I tried but couldn’t keep from laughing.
When I had pointed to the statue of Lincoln upon entering the visitor center and said, “That’s Abraham Lincoln,” Eli had taken my words, in typical 5-year-old fashion, quite literally.
As I watch some people defending and others destroying the statues of heroes and/or anti-heroes of our nation’s past, I’m glad I’m not a statue, for there are plenty of character defects in my life that would warrant crumbling any monument dedicated to the likes of me.
And then again, maybe I have been “turned to stone,” or at least, like Lot’s wife of old, turned into a statue of salt, for like her, I am guilty of looking back, lingering, and even longing for the sins of my past.
I’ve learned that the backward gaze has destructive consequences.
Reflecting on that particular PopPop and Eli day at Lincoln’s birthplace, I feel a deeper sense of gratitude that believers are called “living stones” (I Peter 2:5), not forms of cement or marble, encased in the mistakes of our past, destined for the rubble heap, but living stones, free to fly—brought to life by God’s amazing grace.
Today, regardless of what the evening news may tell me about the world in which I live, I’m still looking to the heavens, pressing on, buoyed by the heavenly heroes surrounding me, who are rooting me on, admonishing me to remain faithful to that high calling, the mission of reaching out to all— red and yellow, black and white—letting each person know, they are precious in His sight.
And for that reminder, I have the plainspoken words of a 5-year-old to thank.