Memorial Day 2016: We remember

Jesus tells us in John 15:13, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Each year on Memorial Day we stop to remember the love of those servicemen and women who gave the ultimate price to keep us free. To pay the ultimate price is worthy of our remembrance and gratitude to God. It’s worthy of us to stop and say a prayer for those still in harms way across this globe who risk all that we might be safe. As for us, at Arvada Christian, we remember. We give honor and we give thanks to God for the sacrifice of so many in our military who paid the ultimate price.

It was President Ronald Reagan who said, “It is, in a way, an odd thing to honor those who have died in defense of our country, in defense of us, in wars far away. Imagination plays a trick. We see these soldiers in our mind as old and wise. We see them as something like the founding fathers--gray and gray-haired. But most of them were boys when they died and they gave up two lives. The one they were living and the one they would have lived. When they died they gave up their chance to be husbands and fathers and grandfathers. They gave up their chance to be revered old men. They gave up everything for our country for us. We owe them a debt we can never repay. All we can do is remember them: what they did and why they had to be buried for us.”

This Memorial Day will you pause and remember? Will you say a “thank you” to God for this country and those who had to die to make her a reality? We may see all the problems facing us as a nation and the moral decline that surrounds us and wonder, “Is America great?” But it was the freedom bought with blood and life that allows this nation to move from God and that same price allows us to work to move her back to God again. Thank God for America! Thank God for those who gave all to make her what she is. We remember.