Yesterday, December 20th, I celebrated my 30th birthday. It seems strange to me to be thinking about my thirties as here and now, rather than something in the perhaps not so distant future, yet here they are. One story that comes to mind about the thirtieth birthday is the time when Julius Caesar found himself standing in front of a statue of Alexander the Great when the Roman general was himself 30. He found himself weeping at the thought of how little he had accomplished at that point compared what to the Macedonian king and conqueror of much of the known world had done by the age of 30.

I for one don’t care as much for conquest or war, I’d rather avoid both and live peacefully, yet I still had my own moment of reflection just a few days ago at the tomb of the man who I have on some occasions referred to as my “patron saint” in the American civic religion.

Last week, on my move back to Kansas City, I stopped in Springfield, Illinois to pay a visit at the Lincoln Tomb. It’s one such monument that I’ve visited a handful of times before, but never before this time have I been alone with the Lincolns in the building. We are at a moment in our history when things seem to rhyme with Lincoln’s day, when we Americans are divided against one another to such an extreme not seen in these last 160 years. Lincoln has always been a sort of patron saint for me in our American civic religion, someone who I looked up to as a boy in the Chicago suburbs over twenty years ago, and so in this visit I found myself asking him to guide our leaders today, to offer them wisdom to “bind up the nation’s wounds” as he endeavored to do.

In a day as now when the loudest voices nearly drown out all the rest in our public discourse we need more quiet people, like Lincoln, to step up and speak out. I have tried in my own way both in public and in the Wednesday Blog to do this but have felt inadequate to the task and unheard by society at large. I worry today that we have lost sight of the need for balance in our lives, a drive for excess, loud colors, and garish noise contributing to the cacophony which makes maintaining our great society more difficult with each passing day. We ought to remember the common humanity that binds us together and “confidently hope that all will yet be well.”I hope these next years of my fourth decade will be good ones, that all the dreams of personal and professional accomplishments will be realized, and that we may again have a time of unity, and perhaps peace, in this country and around the globe.