Ever see the movie ANTZ? I'm sitting in the Radisson Hotel across from Valley Forge in PA. A circular building that closely resembles a beehive, in every way imaginable. There are conferences and seminars happening all over this building and I'm just another drone adding to the noise. Business deals are happening all around me and money is changing banks as the game of financial wizardry is played out over and over again. Whatever importance we attach to our current activities, it pales in the light of the historical sacrifices that this ground has witnessed. I'm sitting a block away from one of the most famous campouts in American history. Remember stories of this place from history class? The images are heartrending, dramatic and so powerful: Bloody footprints in the snow left by bootless men. Starving soldiers wrapped in thin blankets huddled around a smoky fire of green wood. These are the indelible images of suffering and endurance associated with Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-78. "An army of skeletons appeared before our eyes naked, starved, sick and discouraged," wrote New York's Gouverneur Morris of the Continental Congress. The Marquis de Lafayette wrote: "The unfortunate soldiers were in want of everything; they had neither coats nor hats, nor shirts, nor shoes. Their feet and their legs froze until they were black, and it was often necessary to amputate them." A bitter George Washington — whose first concern was always his soldiers — would accuse the Congress of "little feeling for the naked and distressed soldiers. I feel superabundantly for them, and from my soul pity those miseries, which it is neither in my power to relieve or prevent."
Yet Washington was a man of faith and prayer. At the close of the Revolutionary War on June 14, 1783 he wrote the following letter.

"I have thus freely declared what I wished to make known, before I surrendered up my public trust to those who committed it to me. The task is now accomplished. I now bid adieu to your Excellency, as the chief magistrate of your State, at the same time I bid a last farewell to the cares of office and all the employments of public life.
It remains, then, to be my final and only request that your Excellency will communicate these sentiments to your legislature at their next meeting, and that they may be considered the legacy of one, who has ardently wished, on all occasions, to be useful to his country, and who, even in the shade of retirement, will not fail to implore the divine benediction on it.

I now make it my earnest prayer that God would have you, and the State over which you preside, in his holy protection; that he would incline the hearts of the citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to government, to entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another, for their fellow-citizens of the United States at large, and particularly for brethren who have served in the field; and finally that he would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility, and pacific temper of mind, which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed religion, and without an humble imitation of whose example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy nation."

People just don't talk that way anymore and it's to our shame. May God grant His blessing and grace to the 'bretheren who have served in the field'.