What Do You See?

    We have recently celebrated a great national holiday, with parades, fireworks, and in Eastport, the arrival of a big Navy ship, the USS Anzio, named after one of the great amphibious landings of World War II.  These events down east were capped by a summer hurricane that crushed cars, smashed into people's houses, and did untold property damage.
    A similarly unusual confluence of events was described by the prophet Amos, whose book we having been reading this week.  No professional forecaster, he insisted "I am a herdsmen, and a dresser of sycamore trees., and the Lord took me from following the flock, and said to me: Go, prophesy to my people Israel."  Amos Ch. 7, vs. 14-15.   Amos was called by God to speak difficult words in a smooth season.  In a time of national prosperity, he denounced the nation for its reliance on military might, for grave injustice in social dealings, abhorrent  immorality, and its shallow, meaningless piety.
       "And the Lord said to me:
             Amos, what do you see?
       And I said,
            A plumb line . . . "
In a vision, Amos saw the Lord standing beside a  wall with a plumb line in his hand.  Like a hopelessly crooked wall, the nation had become irreparable, and the Lord said : " I will never again pass by them."  Ch. 7, vs. 8.  Israel would be made desolate, a wasteland dismembered by the sword.
   Again, He said:
       "Amos, what do you see?
    And I said,
        A basket of summer fruit."
Like fresh garden produce, that quickly spoils and becomes rotten, the nation's blooms were about to be swept away:
   "The end has come upon my people Israel,
         I will never again pass by them."
   What could be more desolating than to be overlooked by the hand of God?  And yet, even in the midst of such distress, there is hope:
     " For lo, I will command,
         and shake the house of Israel
             among all the nations
       as one shakes a sieve."
As our trees and gardens were shaken and washed away by last Saturday's storm, God will restore his planting:
    " 'For I will replant them upon the land,
            and they shall never again be plucked up
       out of the land which I have given them,'
              says the Lord your God."  Ch. 9, vs. 15.
On this Independence Day holiday, what did you see?