James K Polk – 4 Goals

I’m thinking of a number…

Americans have a love affair with numbers and lists. We have David Letterman’s Top Ten List. We have the BCS football rankings. We have our shopping list. On the job we list our priorities. And what kind of visit would it be to Santa if a kid didn’t have a list of toys for him. We can list the states by the order they entered the union, their size, their population, and I even saw a list with the states with greatest areas of inland water. Historians rank the Presidents, although they often differ in their order. My wife will give me three choices of restaurants to eat at. I even have two books in J.L. Meredith’s series “Book of Bible Lists.”

One of our Presidents even composed a short, four-items list of the things he wanted to accomplish while he was in the White House. His name was James K. Polk and most presidential historians have him ranked in the top 10 (oh no, another list) of our greatest presidents. The four things he wanted to accomplish, and he did, were:

• Reestablish the Independent Treasury (1846, Government funds would be held in the Treasury and not in banks or financial institutions)
• Reduce tariffs (1846, Congress approved Walker Tariff)
• Aquire some or all of the Oregon Country (1846, Oregon Treaty with Great Britain)
• Aquire California and New Mexico from Mexico (1848, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo)

James K. Polk also added one more item to his list. He said he would do it all in one term and would not run for reelection. This last one was more of a campaign strategy than an actual belief. Polk worked the convention trying to be everyone’s second choice. When the convention deadlocked Polk’s name was offered on the eighth ballot with the pledge he would not seek a second term and maybe by then the other candidates would sort things out and have their turn. He won the nomination on the ninth ballot. Even though it was a general election Electoral Vote landslide (Polk: 170; Clay: 105), James K. Polk is the only elected President to lose both his birth state (North Carolina) and the state of his residence (Tennessee) in the same election.

After finishing reading the Bible I came up with my own top 10 list. Here is my Top Ten Things I Learned by Reading the Bible All the Way Through:

1. The Bible is filled with characters, each one with a little bit of me in them.
2. God is so wise he doesn’t let me or Biblical people always get our way, no matter how much we plead.
3. God is sovereign and he doesn’t have to give us answers to our questions.
4. I don’t think we have a clue how much God gets upset with sin and evil.
5. Cover your eyes! I’ve read the back of the Book. God wins.
6. I don’t know why, but God loves me.
7. If you can hold it, it can be taken away.
8. God sent the beggars and misfits to see where our hearts really are.
9. It’s not faith until it is tested.
10. God gives me a verse for every occasion. Sometimes the same verse helps me with two opposite emotions.