MEMORIAL DAY: HONORING OUR MILITARY SOLDIERS

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Today as we remember those who died while serving in our country’s armed services, I’d like to express my gratitude for the gift of their sacrificial lives and let their families know very sorry I am for their loss.

In addition, I thank all the men, women and children who have served and continue to serve this wonderful nation of ours! Thank you for your sacrifices, for your struggles and for your perseverance in the face of incredible odds. Thank you for defending our freedom to walk into our lives and our futures with fearless abandon!

I am a military brat and my brother is an Army veteran and I can tell you from experience, that a military vocation is an act of heroism and a sacred source of strength within the fabric of our society. Though I will never fully understand the hellish hatred that pits one human being against another, I clearly embrace the human ideals of faith, family, duty, commitment, heroism and honor that soldiers strive to uphold.

No, I've never been deployed to a war zone...but my brother has and gratefully, he returned home safely. I did however, bid many tearful farewells to my father as the Air Force shipped him off to Vietnam, Thailand and Korea. It’s pretty traumatizing saying goodbye to a parent for a year at a time, but I can’t even imagine the pain of bidding the final farewell, because your dad or mom was killed in a war zone.

More than a million American fighting men and women have served each and every one of us and paid the ultimate sacrifice, their lives. And so please join me in a silent prayer of thanksgiving for those holy souls and let us ask for divine protection over all the sons and daughters, husbands and wives who are risking their lives every single day in faraway lands. I will close with this excerpt from:

November 19, 1863
Soldiers National Cemetary
Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
…”The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”

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