Just a Statue?

          Psalm 135:15-16 (NKJV)

 The idols of the nations are silver and gold,  The work of men’s hands.

 They have mouths, but they do not speak; Eyes they have, but they do not see;

     In Charlottesville and Durham, and throughout the south, statues are threatened and toppled. But why? They are mere blocks of granite. Green with age and covered in droppings, they stare blindly into the future. Those who carved them are long since gone.

          The ones who placed them on those pedestals have turned to dust. And the name of those who wore the gray wool uniforms have, for the most part, been forgotten. So what did the statue do? What CAN a statue do?

                     It can remind us of a hatred that flourished a century ago, in a different time and a different culture. But all that has  changed. Gone. Only the statue remains.

          Those who look up at that monument of old can either whip themselves into a frenzy over history past, or they can point to it and say to their children, “Never again. Never again.”

                     What we have done to one another is egregious. An abomination. Unthinkable. It must never happen again. But are we, in our blind anger,  bringing the statue back to life with our rhetoric and our hatred?

          A partial quote from George Orwell’s novel ‘1984’, may hold a glimpse of where the present path is leading us.   “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

          In 1 Samuel 5 we read about a  statue that represented a false god and been toppled by the Lords presence. But what was the statue itself but a block of carved stone? It was not the problem; it was the people and where they had placed their attentions  that was the problem. And the beginning of bigger ones for them.

          Rather than  tear down history, lets lift it up. Lift it up as a symbol of mans inhumanity to man, and pledge  that we will never again  become like they once were.