Nation's History

Great post on Al Mohler's blog about David McCullogh's address to Hillsdale College, located in that state up north. McCullogh stated:

"Keep in mind that when we were founded by those people in the late 18th century, none of them had had any prior experience in either revolutions or nation-making. They were, as we would say, winging it. And they were idealistic and they were young. We see their faces in the old paintings done later in their lives or looking at us from the money in our wallets, and we see the awkward teeth and the powdered hair, and we think of them as elder statesmen. But George Washington, when he took command of the continental army at Cambridge in 1775, was 43 years old, and he was the oldest of them. Jefferson was 33 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. John Adams was 40. Benjamin Rush – one of the most interesting of them all and one of the founders of the antislavery movement in Philadelphia – was 30 years old when he signed the Declaration. They were young people. They were feeling their way, improvising, trying to do what would work. They had no money, no navy, no real army. There wasn't a bank in the entire country. There wasn't but one bridge between New York and Boston. It was a little country of 2,500,000 people, 500,000 of whom were held in slavery, a little fringe of settlement along the east coast. What a story. What a noble beginning. And think of this: almost no nations in the world know when they were born. We know exactly when we began and why we began and who did it."

It shocked me to hear the author of the Declaration of Independance was only 33 when he wrote it! That's just a couple years older than me. I always pictured Washington leading the troops, gumming on old bread with his wooden teeth. I assumed that his vast "experience" was one of his greatest strengths.

I guess in many ways I totally feel like I am just winging it too. Maybe being idealistic and young isn't such a bad thing. Maybe we shouldn't let our young age make us feel inferior, but rather we could raise the bar for other believers regarding their speech, life, love, faith and purity. Huh, sounds familiar (I Timothy 4:12).