Just some early morning thoughts from me to you…
“I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land…”
Ezekiel 22:30 (NIV)“Yet you risked everything here. Why? We look at you and somehow we know the answer.
It was faith and belief; it was loyalty and love…
You all knew that some things are worth dying for.”
President Ronald Reagan—June 6, 1984, in Normandy, France“This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that a person will lay down his life for his friends.”
John 15: 12-13 (NASB)“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman….”
Thomas Paine (December 25, 1776)
Thomas Paine wrote those words, reflecting a call to duty, after the loss of New York to the British on December 23, 1776. Two days later on Christmas morning his words were read to the troops by order of General George Washington.
And through conflicts at Ticonderoga, Trenton, Princeton, Saratoga, Valley Forge, and many more, our Nation stood victorious at the British surrender at Yorktown, ending our war for independence.
All leading to a chapter in civilization unlike any which history will ever record, as this great country—America—was beginning.
And it was all about duty.
And it is all about duty today, as together as a Nation this week we pause, on Veterans Day, to remember those who have stood in the gap for us throughout the two-hundred and fifty years since our beginning in 1776.
All those who, in the face of uncertainty and seemingly overwhelming odds, stood to lose it all—and often did—to leave a legacy which should remind us that the value of freedom and everything else we hold dear was not obtained cheaply, but at great price.
It was all about duty.
We can never forget.
So many, for so long, have paid the price for all of us, beginning at Bunker Hill and Lexington and Concord and down through Valley Forge.
They made the first payment for us. And that payment has been kept up to date through the Argonne, Normandy, Iwo Jima, Tarawa, Pusan, and Pork Chop Hill, and across a thousand hills in Southeast Asia, and the burning sands of the Persian Gulf and Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan.
And on Veterans Day, and every day, we need to remember and honor them, and the heritage of this great Nation they established, protected, and maintained for us all.
Some of them never came back, and others came back on stretchers and on crutches, in wheelchairs, and in boxes, while still others were spit upon and ridiculed.
Patriots who fought, were wounded, or died, so that you and I might continue to live, laugh, sit, sleep, and care for and lift our families and friends, and, yes, even pray and worship today and every day in freedom.
They paid the price for us.
We can never forget.
And we must make sure that generation after generation knows that heritage, and what they did for us, as we pass on the torch of freedom they lit for us as this great Nation began, and continued throughout our history.
They paid the price for us.
We can never forget.
It was, and is, all about duty, to be embraced generation after generation.
In His Name–Scott
We will all be grateful, proud, and moved watching this video, with its powerful scenes, while listening to the anthem “Hymn to the Fallen” by John Williams from the movie “Saving Private Ryan.”
