Mike Fichter's blog

The first time I visited Washington, D.C., with my family, it was like trying to take a drink of water from a fire hose. If you’ve been there you know what I mean – everything from learning how to ride the Metro to figuring out the layout of the multiple Smithsonian buildings takes time. Trying to do it without looking like a tourist is impossible.

Then there is the issue of the beltway traffic. By comparison, you know when you’re getting close to Indianapolis when you get to I-465. You know when you’re getting close to Washington when you’re half a day away. I still have no idea whether it’s tougher getting out or getting in, but I do know that it took me over three hours on a holiday weekend to drive from Alexandria to Fredericksburg, Virginia – roughly forty miles away. That fits my definition of a traffic problem.

Still, there are few places like the nation’s capital when it comes to stirring up the patriotic blood. If you asked me to narrow it all down to the one place I would recommend to a friend traveling to Washington for the first time, my choice would be immediate: Arlington National Cemetery. In fact, I believe this is the one historic place that every American should visit at least once in life.

I cannot adequately express in words the emotions that I experienced the first time that I beheld the seemingly endless rows of white crosses that stand as a quiet but powerful reminder that our freedom was bought with a severe price. Like most visitors to Arlington, my family visited the graves of the well-known and the highly decorated. Yet my eyes kept glancing to the horizon, wondering about the lives and the stories and the families behind each of those crosses on the rolling lawn.

Then I noticed the Capitol building across the Potomac, and I wondered how many of those men and women elected to serve we the people, and to guard our hard-earned freedoms, are actually serving themselves instead.

It was Alexis de Tocqueville who said: “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.” What would he say today, if he knew that America has allowed the abortion deaths of 176 times the number of Americans buried in Arlington? I fear we may already know the answer.

There are two key verses in the Bible that we would all do well to take to heart when considering the gravity of our work to protect life: “Deliver those who are drawn toward death, and hold back those stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, ‘surely we did not know this’, does not He who weighs the hearts consider it?” Proverbs 24:11-12

I’ve probably read these verses a hundred times or so over the years, but it wasn’t until just a few weeks back that I noticed – really noticed—the powerful verse that immediately precedes.

Proverbs 24: 10 states, “If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small.”

Or as many people might paraphrase: when the going gets tough, the tough get going.

I guess this verse leaped off the page for me because it is a perfect and wise response to a phrase that I’ve heard many times over the last year, namely that our nation is in for a “long, hard slog” if we hope to correct so many of the serious fractures eating away at our moral conscience. It’s just my guess, but I believe most people sense this to be true. The problem is doing something about it.

Long, hard slogs aren’t supposed to be easy. It conjures up images of the Bataan Death March, Washington’s troops freezing at Valley Forge, or Grant’s relentless and punishing campaigns at places like Cold Harbor and Petersburg.

We are a nation possessing a history of long, hard slogs. Maybe we have forgotten what it’s like to tighten our belts or to bow our knees. But just because so many have forgotten does not mean that our heritage no longer exists.

There is indeed a long, hard slog ahead, but ever a nation existed on the face of the earth that could rise to the occasion, this is it. You sense it when you hear the national anthem before a ballgame.

You see it in the eyes of the veterans who still honor the fallen on Memorial Day.

You know it because your heart beats just a little bit faster when the wind catches the stars and stripes and snaps it to attention.

Long, hard slogs are what drives people to do more than they ever thought possible. It means sacrifice in order to get the job done, even when it means doing without so that a generation that follows will enjoy the God-given right to life that every child deserves.

And should we be tempted to despair that a long, hard slog lies in the path ahead, let us keep in mind that it is precisely for such a time as this that we are given this time on the stage of American history.

If we faint in the day of adversity, our strength is indeed small.

But when we rise to the occasion, that’s the stuff that legends and legacies are made of.