A Swingin' Good Time...

It's been a while since I've been to this part of the jungle. Business with the hairless lowland apes has kept me occupied and distracted. But, then, this was always supposed to be just an occasional posting place, anyway.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the need for personal integrity and reliability. About what used to be called simple "faithfulness".

I was reading again, this past week, an account of an Indian raid on the Deerfield, MA. settlement in 1704. The raid took place in the early morning hours of February 29, at the conclusion of a heavy snow. There was, completely surrounding the settlement, a wooden stockade – built earlier the previous year when the first alarms were sounded about an impending raid. It had needed repairs and though some were made, winter had caught them unfinished.

In truth, the raid on Deerfield was one of the forerunner battles of what would eventually become known, after a few decades, as ‘The French and Indian War’. During that battle over a hundred captives were taken and marched, through the bitter cold and over frozen ground, into Quebec, Canada, there to be the slaves of various masters. It was a hard and indescribable journey.

The story especially affected my heart because it was written by one of my ancestors…the Puritan Pastor, John Williams. Over the course of their unbelievably inhumane treatment – a captivity lasting more than two and one-half years – Pastor Williams witnessed the butching of two of his children, a six-week old son and a six-year son. His wife was, likewise, murdered because she was not sufficiently recovered from her child-birth to endure the journey’s trial. One of his daughters, named Eunice, never was returned or permitted to be redeemed from her Indian captors.

We do not have enough time to recount all the horrors of their way or the gross persecutions they were made to bear. To tell the stories of the women-with-child who were slaughtered or the infants and wee ones who were murdered in cold blood would be tedious and heart-rending to both tell and hear.

But, as I turned that story over in my mind, the saddest words it contains are those to be found in the opening lines. There Pastor Williams writes: “On the twenty-ninth of February 1704, not long before break of day, the enemy came in like a flood upon us, our watch[men] being unfaithful.”

There it is…the cause of the whole sad account. The twenty soldiers hired by Deerfield and sent by the colony were unfaithful to their duty and on account of this…many tender and innocent lives were lost.

The importance of faithfulness has, therefore, been powerfully brought to my mind and, I hope now, to yours also.

The Apostle once said it this way: "Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful." (1 Corinthians 4:2 NIV)

The Master offers the following promise: "Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life." (Revelation 2:10b NIV)

Let us, then, be faithful.