As this is President’s Week, around the birthdays of two of our most popular presidents, George Washington (February 22) and Abraham Lincoln (February 12), I have been doing much thinking about Mr. Lincoln especially. With Spielberg’s movie getting current attention and Bill O’Reilly’s 2011 book Killing Lincoln, getting a television premiere on the National Geographic channel, there seems to be a lot of revisiting of the 16th President of the United States. Surely we have been visiting him here at the Fischer household.

Marti has taken to audiobooks in a big way, mainly because she learns more through hearing than through reading. She loves to have me read to her as she goes to sleep at night, except that I fall asleep before she does, and it frustrates her no end to have my voice trail off and stop mid-sentence. With my children, I am famous for lapsing into gibberish in the middle of a bedtime story. Anything can come out of my mouth at that catatonic place just before falling to sleep. I am famous for incoherent sentences. “Papa! You’re doing it again!”

It is for this reason that Marti has taken to audiobooks in a big way, and lately, books about the Lincolns (Mary Todd Lincoln certainly had a colorful life) have dominated the Fischer air waves. She listens as she puts her make-up on in the morning and takes it off at night, and for going to sleep, there’s nothing like a tireless reader who never sleeps.

I get the benefit of this too, though, and I have been fascinated by learning about Lincoln’s gentle but strong character. One historian called him “hard as rock and soft as the drifting fog.”

His personal secretary and subsequent biographer John Hay wrote of Lincoln, “One of the most tender and compassionate of men, he was forced to give orders that cost thousands of lives…the awful responsibility resting upon him as the protector of an imperiled republic kept him true to his duty, but could not make him unmindful of the intimate details of that vast sum of human misery involved in a civil war.”

He was especially famous for his pardons.  “No man holding in his hands the key of life and death ever pardoned so many offenders, and so easily,” said Indiana Congressman Schuyler Colfax. He was so famous for pardons that one general claimed the only way to avoid a Lincoln pardon was to shoot the guy first.

One could possibly understand this with the weight of 600,000 civil war deaths on him. Every life he could save was personal to him, and he went over every case looking for some reason to extend mercy. Once, when 300 Dakota Indians were sentenced to death following a skirmish with the U.S. Army, Lincoln reviewed every case and pardoned all but 39.

I can’t help but think that he is very close to the heart of God here who is not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). God is a God of contradiction in that He is both just and merciful, and probably no leader in recorded history has understood and embodied this contradiction better than Abraham Lincoln. If he ever erred on the side of mercy, it’s probably because he is hoping God will do the same for him.

Quotes are from a History Channel online article: “Lincoln’s Gentle Legend.”