The Coin of Memorial Day

The coin of the value of Memorial Day should be more than one day. One side of the coin is Never Forget and the other side is Always Remember. Never Forget is a solemn value that requires us to keep a sacred moment that we will guard against distractions of living which are different for all of us.  Memorial Day is one of those times that should be sacred.

Never Forget reminds me of when a student of mine who had cancer which eventually took her life. She shared with our school in a chapel address that when cancer patients are undergoing chemotherapy, it is the worse series of a terrible time, but when you are between having chemotherapy or radiation treatment, you forget what it was like to be miserable and you bask in the bliss of normalcy. During this time between treatments, you quickly forget what a challenging time it is. This is true for those who died for our freedom. In essence, it is human to not include those hard times in our consciousness.

Forgetting of the important parts of life we can succumb to a kind of amnesia of the roughest moments, and such is the reason for Memorial Day. It breaks through the national amnesia regarding the stories of those who have fallen for our freedom.

The other side of the Coin of Memorial Day is an active time when we look past the sales in stores, games that are played, cookouts that are held to focus on the cost of freedom.  It requires action to always be grateful for those who have died that we remain free. It is called patriotic. It is hard to do that on a regular basis when so much of the deliberations in Washington seem trite compared to the price paid by our men and women in uniform. They are not at the heart of their deliberations.

The first Memorial Day Seech was given at Arlington National Cemetery, known then as Declaration Day. A crowd of 5000 gathered in 1868 to hear then Ohio Congressman and veteran James A. Garfield deliver remarks in honor of the Civil War dead. “I am oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion,” he added. If silence is ever golden, it must be here beside the graves of 15,000 men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death

was a poem, the music of which can never be sung.

John 15:13         No greater love hath no man but this than to lay down his life for his (her) friends.”