Last weekend, my church held a men’s retreat in Gettysburg, PA. Once that location was chosen, my pastor brought me in to the planning process with the idea that I’d lead a tour of the battlefield as a free time option for the men who were attending. While I was really excited about that part, the experience turned out to be so much more.

Our speaker for the retreat, Drew Derreth, gave some fantastic insights on the struggles we face as men. In many ways, he led us in sort of an “anti-men’s retreat”. We focused not on how to be big manly, go-get-’em men, but on how to acknowledge that none of us is really capable of being as strong as we’d like to be, and that we should embrace the path of weakness, humility, and grace.

Since the entire group would not be going on my tour, it was suggested that I give a quick “5 Minutes of Civil War History” talk at the beginning of each of Drew’s sessions, so that everyone would get a sense for the history that surrounded us in Gettysburg. I threw together some Keynote slides on three topics:

1. What Brought the Armies to Gettysburg
2. Major General Daniel E. Sickles
3. Gettysburg Aftermath

The talks were well-received by the guys, and brought questions immediately after the sessions, so they worked as a nice ice-breaker for me with some of the guys I didn’t know at the church.

It was also super cool that one of the guys, Ken – a Civil War re-enactor – brought some of his artifacts along so there was some actual, tangible history in the room. That extra touch really brought it home in my opinion.

The tour took place on Saturday afternoon, and was scheduled as a 3-hour excursion during our free time. After a quick lunch at the always-awesome Tommy’s Pizza, we rolled out to the first day’s battlefield, and everyone got a hand-out with the list of stops and some maps for reference.

At the outset, I was a little nervous. This was the largest group I’d ever been with at Gettysburg, and the spotlight was entirely on me. I was the expert. But the tour went really well. It was an absolutely beautiful day, so the numerous photographers in the group had terrific conditions to capture the scenery and the monuments. Steve even got a great shot of the group at end of the tour:

As much as I love being in Gettysburg and sharing the history surrounding that little town with other people, last weekend was about so much more than that. Even though I’ve been going to Chapelgate church services for several years with my wife, and have become really close with many of the staff members there, I haven’t really felt like I was part of the “community” until last weekend. We have a great group of men who really embraced me as one of their own, and I’m very thankful for that.

I make no secret of the fact that I’m a libertarian. I’m also a recently-converted Christian. Some people (on both “sides”, as it were) see this as being something of a conflict. Libertarians are supposed to be free spirits – we’re not supposed to like authority, so we’d naturally hate church, and church people wouldn’t be accepting of us because we wouldn’t be as rigid and controlling as they are.

In reality, these two traits are totally compatible. For one thing, not all churches are stuffy and authoritarian. And part of being free to choose how you want to live your own life means that you are free to live in a “conservative” way, too. In fact, there’s quite a bit that libertarians and Christians have in common – one of those is on how we look at charity.

It’s well known that libertarians don’t look at government programs (or taxes that go toward them) as being charitable – they are even seen as forced theft to some of us. REAL charity we say, comes from giving of yourself because you want to, not because someone else is making you do it. Christians see it the same way. When the collection plate comes past, or when a friend or neighbor needs help, it’s not enough to say, “I already paid my taxes.” You’re supposed to have a giving spirit, and that means going above and beyond.

I was thinking about all this in church this morning. Last week, my pastor Mike approached me about leading a tour of Gettysburg when some of the men in our church head up there for a retreat this coming spring. He knows about my interest in Civil War history and especially Gettysburg. In fact, we went up there together a little over a year ago. One of the things that I mentioned to him on that visit was about how practically all the buildings in town became hospitals in some sense. Of course, there were major hospitals set up in big buildings in town: one was at Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church. There was an outdoor hospital – Camp Letterman – set up on the east side of town, too. But there were so many wounded that those hospitals weren’t enough, and many citizens took a few wounded men into their own homes to care for them. It was a point that resonated enough for Mike that he mentioned it in a sermon last fall.

The story I relayed to him was one I’d picked up from the diary of Sarah Broadhead. She was one of the 2,400 residents of Gettysburg left to deal with the 50,000+ casualties left over from the battle. Here’s what she wrote on July 9, 1863 – less than a week after the fighting ended: