Always Memorialize

Always Memorialize

We are not finished with Memorial Day, and we never will be.

I get the late May three-day weekend thrills. Ooo-eee. I hope you enjoyed some normalcy this year in that you could relax with what you have.

As we move into June and the rest of the year, let’s hold onto this past weekend and not pack away our national recognition of loss. In fact, let’s allow grief to have its space and place every single day. You alone may not need to visit this place any time soon, but someone you know does.

Then again, if you think of it, you are holding an old wound, an old hurt, or an old loss of someone, and their name or names easily come to you. The pain may overshadow you.

Because secularization has taken so much from Christian practice in my lifetime, a prime example being sports played on Sunday mornings, I encourage Christians to take seemingly secular holidays like Flag Day and the Fourth of July, and load them with Christian love, expression, witness and meaning. Every day is a day to honor and share the message of God through His Son, and Christianity is absolutely necessary to the world when it comes to memorializing grief. Jesus, our suffering servant, took our sins away by His death. Because of this, we can live forever with him no where near hell but in this beyond any utopic location, heaven itself.

While this does our grief, it doesn’t take it away—at least completely. We still miss our loved ones.

I think of a fifty-something-year-old mother who tragically lost her twenty-one-old son a couple of years ago. More pieces in her life fell apart after this. Hard pieces. Painful pieces. Her well-adjusted, happy life no longer exists to the point where those around her experience what feels which is like the bone-on-bone pain of advanced back or knee arthritis.

Other acute cases of grief surround us. For me, I recently saw a sixty-something-year-old mourner walk through the cemetery holding flowers that would soon adorn a grave. Her face was set like the stones around her. So much was so hard.

Here is another story. A widow is half of who she was since her husband died almost five year ago.

Yesterday, I received a note from a church member about a recent sermon where I spoke offhandedly about the pain of loss. Well into her nineties, this faithful one wrote that the death of her dad was the most significant loss in all of her life.

This is just the top of one of many lists I can share with you. I share one more. A want-to-be mom and dad long to adopt a child through foster care and the wait is actually weight on their hearts each day.

Grief lives with each of us each day. It needs to be honored, set aside. It needs its chance to teach us what it means to be in love not just to yesterday and to what was, but to today and what is. We can’t have Memorial Day be JUST a day.

Maybe someone is thinking I have taken something away from the original intent of Memorial Day. I can see how that thought could come about given what I have shared here so far. Let me be clear. Our fallen soldiers do need a special time and place for all of us to recognize and to grieve. That this specific day happens annually for these brave men and women who lost their lives for this nation is not just necessary, but beautiful.

I also invite you to look out for your own grief days, and the grief days of others. This sensitivity and understanding are a must.

In our grief, let’s remember our God holds us when we cry. Sometimes he uses the hands and hearts of others to do so.