Memorial Day Message

All of the attributes we value highly and treasure are a direct result of the men and women who made the decision to give their life for a period of time for our country’s freedom. They knew beforehand that it might mean coming home in a box draped with a flag. Those men and women who stood up and were willing to die for our nation if necessary did not die just for their friends. They died for all of us. Knowing that the values, freedoms, principles, and blessings of living in this nation were all worth their highest and best effort.

People will equate their sacrifice with that of Jesus giving His life for our spiritual freedom. Many of the veterans who died in service were not prepared for death, but they went anyway. Many from the first shot of the Revolution to Gettysburg to Desert Storm and Desert Shield went into service to ensure that people anywhere in the world would be free of the tyranny of evil and wicked rulers bent on destroying the good people of the world.

When we contemplate their gift of life to us, their sacrifice of personal liberty, and their own pursuit of their personal happiness, it should be a reminder that although the word Freedom has free in its makeup, Freedom is not free but was bought with a very high price and it was paid with the blood of many who were very dear to the families they left behind. They are to be remembered with fondness and with the utmost respect too. For their sacrifice transcends our many petty little inconsequential differences that we serve up to one another as an excuse to wage a social conflict that should really have no place among those of so great a nation.

It is my prayer that this Memorial Day will be a time when we as a nation of many different ethnic groups resolve to live worthy of those men and women who laid down their lives for our freedom. We are able if we wish to elevate our behavior above the muck and mire and the slime of the swamp of politics gone bad and corruption and greed that seems to be the norm. They are worthy of better from us who have lived while they died for our freedoms. We are free indeed because of them, so let us not use our freedom for selfish and evil purposes to subvert and control and manipulate, but to uplift and to pray for and support one another, being as concerned for our neighbor as we are for ourselves. If they loved our mutual and common freedoms and believed so strongly in those higher ideals, then let us be willing to live in a manner and behave worthy of those same ideals.

May God help us to not trample their precious gifts in the mud and mire, but cherish and treasure such, as they are otherwise going to find their death in vain. What shame that would bring, what disgrace!

As we see the flag of this great nation either flying from a pole or draped over the fallen, let us remember that in spite of the fact that those who gave their lives were of every color and ethnicity, yet they all shared the same types of blood and they all regardless of skin color were united by the one purpose, and to make it possible for all people of every nationality who comes here to be identified by just three colors, White of purity in principles, Red for the color of every human’s blood that was shed for freedom, and Blue for those ideals that lift the common man to noble and royal thought and intent. They all died so that this nation which has been different than all others on the earth and is now and forever set apart by the Founding Principles at our beginning could endure til the end of time as we know it. There are none higher seeing that what is established in our Founding was first established in the Holy Word.

Our greatest tribute to those precious sacrifices of each fallen one’s final minutes will be to live worthy of their sacrifice in everything we say and do just as we should live worthy of what our LORD and Savior Jesus Christ gave for us. Amen

Wm.DavidWaterman