Memorial Day 2019

Memorial Day, 2017

             The hammer's of hell cannot break the chains of patriotism. The finest men, this old, totally blind, 100% disabled, medical officer Veteran, has ever known in life...were Veterans of the warfare struggles of my lifetime. The 126,000 buried in the soil of foreign lands, were even greater. I stood at Normandy on the 25th anniversary of that conflict, that cemetery where so many are buried. I stood at the cemetery in the Phillipines were 18,000 are buried. They all died believing that America was worth defending and giving the last measure of their devotion. To the disabled, we learn to glory in infirmities. God showed this blind Veteran long ago that faith is better than sight.

            This very morning, Memorial Day 2017, most of the working people taking a holiday, my driver escorted me to my office building complex. At 87, I am still on the job...putting out the trash carts for my office tenants, my assistant was thrilled to see live, energetic foxes playing on the grounds of this midtown office complex. For many Veterans, there is a despondency from which you may never recover. I want EVERY disabled Veteran to know, lameness is no barrier to anything, even a joint heir of a King. Please remember, the gospel is opposed to all sinfulness, all wickedness. Jesus took all sin to the grave so that we, mere mortals, could be restored with righteousness. As perfect as Jesus' righteousness is, so much is his hatred of sin. There is little goodness in a man who does not have hatred toward sin. GOOD NEWS, the gospel message: Veteran/politician/pastor/parent, salvation and righteousness is a free gift available to everyone...just for the asking.

            This great land, between two great oceans, is an island which God provided for the freedom that is in him. It should not be hidden from the world. When my ancestors landed on these shores, on the good ship "KENT" in 1666...on that small boat, bringing so few things to survive... I cringe when I think of their troubles. I have here sitting next to me, an iron, fire place "cooking pot." They first built a chimney so they could use this pot, and using their sparse tools, built out from it shelters, to protect them from the weather. So many died, so many buried at sea. All they had was there faith.

            They were called "Puritans;" A name of derision...because like present-day committed Christians, they refused to live under the liberality of Government: "anything goes," "the end justifies the means." In the 500 years since the reformation, the deaths of John Husk, John Wycliffe, Martin Luther, and others who had the audacity to bring the word of God to the ears of the common man (Wycliffe and Husk burned at the stake for translating God's word from the Latin Vulgate into English). We memorialize our ancestors, just as we memorialize all those heroes who have made our American way of life possible.