Twenty-two years ago today Grandma Nikki died. I am no longer the wide-eyed, sixteen-year old who knelt beside his dying grandmother as she spoke that incredible prophecy. After twenty-two years of wandering, I have returned to the very city and university where I first began to explore the implications of God's sovereign calling.
     So, on the anniversary of that fateful day in Grandma Nikki's barn, I ask: What lessons have I learned in these past twenty-two years?

During the cold, winter months of 1833, my father suffered from a severe attack of influenza. Martin Dawson, Springfield's only physician, attended to his illness. I am certain God used him to save my father's life. Deeply touched by his Christian benevolence, the seeds of a healer were planted in my soul, even though I was but thirteen at the time.
     Following Nikki's death in `36, when our family visited with Dr. Dawson, I shared my desire to enter the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. I received an immediate and hearty "amen" from Dr. Dawson. Father had just accepted an invitation to Shawnee Mission, Kansas, to assist in mission work among the Indians. Without me, many of the burdens of everyday life would fall upon John Ezra's shoulders.
     But my father saw the fiery vision in my eyes. The next morning he blessed my request to leave home. I arrived in Philadelphia in the fall of `38, my heart afire with vision. I wanted to become a man of strong medicine--not yet realizing just how that desire would be fulfilled.

In 1838 when I climbed into the wagon bound for the University of Philadelphia, I distinctly remember feeling a peculiar, harsh sense of loss. I had only felt it two other times in my life: first at age six, when I learned that my mother had died bringing me into the world, and second, when Grandma Nikki died in my arms. As I waved goodbye to Father and John Ezra, I had no idea why I felt so troubled. Perhaps it was but a foretaste of the even more bitter suffering that would eventually be mine.
     The sorrowful account of my beloved Victoria's death, my former hatred for Beaumont and the loss of nearly three years of my life already fill many journal pages. O how that bitter spring deceived me, first tasting sweet, and then poisoning my soul. At last I have been healed of its acrid contaminations, cleansed by the dayspring and filled with living water. By grace I have gained the freedom of forgiveness and yielded to the work of the Cross.
     Soul, shall I ever escape that bitter spring during my days on earth?

I had chosen the field of medicine for my life's service but I did not suspect that You led me to Philadelphia for a different purpose. From the window at the end of this hall, I can see the stone wall where I first sat in the spring of '39, over nineteen years ago. There I reflected upon the words of the outspoken abolitionist, Dr. Theodore Weld. His words deeply affected me, an impressionable zealous youth. He recounted Senator Daniel Webster's speech before the Senate, a speech which Mrs. Criswell had once instructed our entire grade-school class to memorize:

"While the Union lasts we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out before us, for us and our children. Beyond that I seek not to penetrate the veil. God grant that in my day at least that curtain may not rise! God grant that on my vision never may be opened what lies behind! When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on states dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood."

"The first drops of blood, which are but a prelude to a deluge from the gathering clouds, have fallen."

Throughout the latter forties I not only wrote for the abolitionist cause, but I also began to write about the unprecedented growth taking place in the Kansas-Nebraska region.
     Then, in 1849, I witnessed the dark root of evil sprout its gilded shoots from American soil. Gold had been unearthed at Sutter's Mill. "Westward Ho!" the settlers cried, rushing down the Santa Fe Trail, the California Trail, the Gila Trail, dusty arteries that led thousands to their dream of instant riches. As a reporter, I covered the Oregon Trail, from its point of origin to Fort Kearny, Nebraska, just south of the mighty Platte.
     The western sky is dark. The white man's insatiable pursuit of gold and land, his determination to accumulate wealth, is truly fierce! The Founding Fathers sacrificed their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor for fundamental truths. We have replaced their original goals of religious liberty with our own, a civil religion based on selfish ambition.
     Our altar is the land and its resources; our sacrifices are the Negro and Indian; our sacraments are the inventions of our own hands: the steam locomotive, the telegraph wire, and the cotton gin.
     Is not the dark root that which brings forth the cry of the blood?

What have I learned? When I was young, I spoke as a child. I saw through a glass darkly, knowing only in part the mysteries of God's will that are bound up in His call upon my life. The bitter springs have not stopped flowing, the cry of the blood has not ceased and the dark root of evil in men's souls continues to spread like madness across the land. Sectional pride, malice and greed course through our veins! If this nation is to be saved from "civil feuds" and the shedding of "fraternal blood" as Webster so feared in 1830, then it needs strong medicine, as I have noted profusely in my research on the Founding Fathers.