The Final Tapestry

I have always been fascinated with stories of how a race of people came to be. I love history in all its misery and gore and beauty. You would think that such things are contradictions and yet I have found even in the most miserable, nasty and desolate moments in history there are tiny seeds of hope sewn. Waiting to grow, wanting to be harvested. It is up to those that come after to see those seeds and nourish them so that they may be a gift to us and to those that died.

Why am I waxing poetic about history? I am thinking about how America began. How proud we are as a nation of this red, white and blue country. And yet, the colors on our flag symbolize something we forget too often now that savage viciousness has given way to polished lies of civility.

The white man, the red man and the black man. All righteous in their hopes and dreams, all lost in a storm they never saw coming. And all of us - guilty for the things we would have done and still do today.

The blood, the sweat, the very breath of life. Red, white, blue. For a land that is so big, so full of promise - it wasn't quite big enough and it didn't hold enough promise. People were hurt, people were killed. All for owning a square piece of land that none of us truly will ever own. This is God's land for it is God's earth. Yet we will righteously fight and then pick apart our enemies and feed off their pain like carrion. The land of the free, the land of the brave. The land of broken promises and pain.

If we could have seen the destruction would history be different? Some would say yes but the cynics will always say no. I hold in my heart a seed of hope sewn by God Himself that if we had known, if we could have felt and seen with eyes of love - history would be different. So even as I look with sad eyes in the mirror and see the guilt and shame that has been passed down to me, I feel inside me that seed grow to a tiny little plant, hoping to flower.

I pray someday our children will carve out a new history for us to look upon. One that is full of what God intended. A land not of red, white, and blue - separated and alone, but a land where the red melds with blue and then white and we see a country of one color. The individual strands woven so closely together that from far away all we see is purple, but when examined closely each color is there, lending a hand in the final tapestry.