I’ve been reading David McCullough’s 1776, a thoughtful and fact-packed analysis of the US Revolutionary War.    We’ve all heard how poorly supplied and trained the US forces were. McCullough reproduces various letters from eyewitnesses lamenting that troops were dirty, dumb, undisciplined and lacking even basic fighting tools. (At one point, due to gunpowder shortages, the troops were given spears to fight with. Spears.)

The discussion of the dire situation of the troops is a parenthesis, really, in McCullough’s description of Gen. George Washington’s character.   These sentences caught my eye:

“In truth, things were worse than they realized, and no one perceived this as clearly as Washington.  Seeing things as they were, and not as he would wish them to be, was one of his salient strengths.” (p 70)

It’s as American as apple pie to be a visionary.  And Washington was vision-driven, no doubt. But he evidently knew how to keep himself from the despair of measuring where he was at the time, and where we wanted to be.  Is reality checking a discipline?  It will be interesting to practice this in the coming days.  What if I truly asked God to show me what was real, instead of inventing all the possible ways life could go wrong?  What if I asked God to help me figure out the real problems?

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