Thank You for Your Service

When I was wandering around this fall I decided to drive through the cemetery attached to Kings Veteran’s Home near Waupaca. It’s a peaceful setting on a rolling hillside with wave after wave of symmetrical headstones; each one denoting a life somehow connected to America’s fighting forces.

Picking up snippets of a life from a gravestone always make me think of the hereafter. Is Leland Squires fishing some lake with a heavenly endless limit of fish? Is Richard Verber roaring down some twisties, pushing on the throttle because he never has to worry about crashing his heavenly bike? Does Lawrence Hess’s wife no longer experience the sun’s warmth because her sunshine has been taken from her? How is your epitaph going to read? Will it be significant enough that years later strange people will be stopping to read it and wonder about you?

Take time this week to thank and appreciate the veterans you may know. My favorite one, my Navy WWII father has been gone five years this month. Maybe in his world his ghost ship is continuing to sail the seas off Okinawa instead of being sunk with such a loss of life. Such is life and war. It never really changes does it?