Sunday Snippet: Remembering Remembrance Day…

Sunday was Remembrance Day – Thinking back to the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month… in 1918 and the end of World War One.

It is a day set aside to remember those who have killed during the two World Wars and other conflicts. We have spent this year reading war stories, First World War and the Second World War. Excellent books that describe life during the wars in a way that no textbook could ever explain…

We have recently been learning about family trees and our kids have realised that it was just a couple of generations ago that their great uncles and aunts served in the World Wars… When we have learnt about the ancient Romans and Greeks – that has always been thousands of years ago… but the reality is that these wars were less than one hundred years ago… in living memory so to speak. Books we have read recently have brought the reality of really young men heading off into war, willingly heading into the trenches for their country. Boys the age of my oldest boys… and younger children taken away from home to the country – for their safety. I can not imagine letting my children go…

So we painted poppies and spoke about how blessed we were to have a family, together and safe and how grateful we are to our ancestors… who gave up their lives, “their all” for the peaceful days we enjoy today. And the not so peaceful days. We do take our freedom for granted, we know no better, we haven’t suffered as they did. But we do have traditions… two minutes silence at eleven on the eleventh day of the eleventh month… And we can paint poppies and what a small thing to do. Silly really in the scheme of life. But the small things, the little traditions are the reason that we remember…

Their is nothing new about traditions being put in place to help us remember things… the Bible is full of examples of God providing tangible things into the hands of His people, to help them remember His greatness… Feasts like the Passover, to remember their rescue from slavery. How often are we reminded that we are reading about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, men of olden times – providing a heritage for us to connect to, not just dashes on a timeline, real connections to real people, who lived long ago.

We will forget them, we are so quick to forget names and faces, not to mention events… we do forget. But every year in the Garden of Remembrance near our house, there is a small service on the second Sunday in November and every year we are reminded of what these great men and women did for us. That is tradition – it sparks a memory, it brings a moment, an event in time to the forefront of our thinking. It stops us and grounds us and keeps us from forgetting – that much of the freedom we experience today is because of the young men and women of yesterday who were prepared to give up their lives for us so long ago. One hundred years from now, I will not be around to see my children’s children and even their children but I hope and pray that tradition will help them to remember to take two minutes silence, and perhaps even paint some poppies with their little ones.