Thank A Soldier Today

Today is Memorial Day if you hadn’t already noticed that.

This year, as I have done for a number of years, I will spend time praying for our military. I will spend time specifically praying for several servicemen that I know who are putting themselves in harms way so that I can be safe here in my country. For my college roommate Susan’s son Matt who serves in the Marines. For my cousin Clint who just graduated from the Air Force Academy (GOOD JOB CLINTO!!!) and for my friend Anne’s nephew who this week was wounded in Afghanistan.

Take the time today, or any day for that matter, and thank a solder. HHBL will tell you that I do this whenever I see a serviceman or woman in the airport. Or wherever I happen to be. They have earned the right to have my complete gratitude. And they have it.

And I will take the time to read The Gettysburg Address. I couldn’t say it any better than Abraham Lincoln did. And I would probably need more words:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate - we can not consecrate- we can not hallow this ground. 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 dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they 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.