A Good Man

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In the days that trudged between long marches and grueling battles, it’s said that George Washington would write home to Mount Vernon about the way he wished things to look there. I think he found a reprieve from the war in thinking about his home and directing how his servants should situate things, like the chimneys and trees.

“The chimney in the new room should be exactly in the middle of it. The doors and everything else should be exactly answerable and uniform.”{i}

“…That at the South, of all the clever kind of Trees (especially flowering ones) that can be got, such as Crab apple, Poplar, Dogwood, Sasafras, Lawrel, Willow (especially yellow & Weeping Willow)… these to be interspersed here and there with ever greens such as Holly, Pine, and Cedar, also Ivy…”{ii}

A glance at his letters might seem like the war was tipping in his favor, that he could see victory dawning on the New York horizon, that by Christmastime, the general expected to be back with his riding boots stretched in front of the fire at Mount Vernon. But the truth was that the American army was groveling in defeat, drowning in the sludge of war, and badly outflanked by the British. There were night attacks and traitors and shameful retreats. The winds seemed to be blowing against Washington and his men, and in the fury of that storm, Washington might have found a haven in thinking about his home—about the windows that would face the Virginia sunrise and the candlesticks that would glow on the mantle. 

Washington wasn’t just a general who knew how to be at war; he also knew how to be at home, and that strikes me as a mark of a good man. I think of Sam Gamgee in Tolkien’s books, who never meant to find himself in the throes of battle. Could he have helped it, he’d have stayed in the garden beds and green downs of the Shire. Yet when Sauron’s forces threatened his home, Sam packed his cooking salt and pipe weed, and said of Frodo: “I am going with him.”

In a book called The Countryman’s Year, the farmer noted: “Wanted: more noble men in small places.” They say the same thing today—that a good man is hard to find, but I wonder if they aren’t looking in the wrong places; because I do know good men in small places, who have the nobility of doing their work quietly.

My dad is one of them.

He rises early and makes us coffee and works till dinner and washes the dishes for Mom in the evening. A nobleman might ride a horse into battle, but at the end of the day, he’s simply that: a noble man. He also knows how to build a home, or fix a leak, or plant a garden. Dad is a pastor and shepherd, which places him on the front lines of the good fight for the faith. But he also helps me oil my car and gas up the mower, because a good man is not only a warrior, but a steward. He both fights, and he plants. He knows when to pick up his sword, and when to exchange his sword for a hammer and trowel. He’s a good man who not only fights for what is true, but who, in the heat of the battle, casts his mind toward his true Home. 

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{i} McCullough, David. 1776. Simon & Schuster, 2006.
{ii} Chase, Philander D. “Thoughts of Home: General Washington Kept a Picture of Mount Vernon in His Mind’s Eye During the Revolutionary War.” Washington Papers, 1995. Retrieved from: https://washingtonpapers.org/resources/articles/thoughts-of-home/