ERIC PETERS

The result of a writing exercise with some great songwriters whom I toured with in the spring of 2002. We picked a random page in the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader and each had to write a song on the topic no matter how far-fetched or seemingly impossible. The topic of page 171 in the History Edition details Andre Maginot, the French minister of war in the years immediately following WW1, and his now infamous Maginot Line. Largely considered by the history books as a “monumental waste of effort," it became his glorious but doomed brainchild. The Line in question was a series of massive fortifications and defense systems that spanned the entire French-German border – some 150 miles – and was designed to keep the despised Germans out of their beloved country. Maginot believed that once the Germans noticed the massive guns posed along their border with France, they would never in a million years consider attacking. History books tell the rest of the story, but it is in this same world lesson that I see, in some small a way, my own personal shadows: my sin-scared, and –scarred, self running for the hills when I imagine that a holy God desires to crush me like a venomous serpent because of my faithlessness, my lack of trust, and the sin that encompasses me and dogs my every step. Somehow the thought never crosses my finite mind that the memory of God could indeed be a poor one. Perhaps the most miraculous of all miracles are the ones that leave us scratching our head at their sheer, incomprehensible, inhuman Graciousness. The miracle that we so often take for granted is the one that blesses our soul the most: the miracle of forgetting. It is the miracle most easily forgotten and ignored. Written 2/18-22/02.