This morning, as I was sitting quietly listening to the thunder outside, amidst the flashes of pre-dawn lightning and just chilling with a cup of coffee, I asked Alexa what happened on this day in history, and she told me that Frank Sinatra died on May 14, 1998.

While that was a sad day for the Sinatra family, and a pretty big deal for Old Blue Eyes, it wasn’t really what I had in mind.

Have you ever heard sports commentators talking about who was the best player (in whatever sport) of all time? Most of the time, they mention players who are playing now, or who have retired in the last few years. I suspect that they do this because their programs are geared to a younger audience, but then sometimes I wonder if they even know that major sports have been around for more that 15 or 20 years.

Most of us haven’t really bothered to know much about history, and that makes understanding the present next to impossible, for understanding the world we live in, like understanding Scripture, requires that we keep things in context, and history is context. Granted, I am a history nerd, so maybe I take it too far, but even so, Harry Truman was entirely correct when he said: “The only thing new in the world is history you don’t know.”

Who was Harry Truman again?

Yeah, that’s the problem…

In case anyone cares, here are few minor little things that happened on May 14…

On May 14, 1787 delegates began arriving in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention: For Americans, it really doesn’t get much bigger than that.

In 1796, English medical student Edward Jenner administered the first vaccination for smallpox; I’m glad he did!

In 1804 the Lewis and Clark Expedition began, another really big deal.

In 1864 the Battle of Resaca began in Georgia. This isn’t one of the great famous battles of the American Civil War, but it did mark the beginning of General Sherman’s campaign to capture the critical rail center of Atlanta, Georgia. As it happened, when Atlanta finally fell on August 31 after a two-month siege, not only was it a major strategic victory from a military point of view, it turned the political tide in the North. Democrat George McClellan, running on a peace at any price platform was sure to beat incumbent Abraham Lincoln in the November election which would have resulted in the South winning the War. Yet after the fall of Atlanta, the tide changed and Lincoln won going away. This enabled the passage of the 13^th Amendment prohibiting slavery and the capitulation of the Southern forces early the next year.

In 1948, the State of Israel was proclaimed.

In 1955, the Warsaw Pact was formed.

There’s a great deal more…

As we go through our day today in 2018, most of us won’t do anything that will be remembered for very long, probably none of us will make history. Yet we can touch another with the love of Christ in us, and for that person, it will be as big as anything that has gone on any time before.

Perhaps today can be a day of Salvation for someone you know− time will tell.