From the choir loft I look across the congregation and see a “Flanders Field” of poppies. This is Remembrance Day Sunday and their lapel poppies bring dots of colour along each pew.
We who are left behind soldier on. Living your faith is a struggle. As an Elder I am privy to many of the struggles of those before me. Some of them bear crosses that would literally have me on my knees. Yet we have the freedom to meet here, to share, to go home to warm houses, refrigerators full of food and to know bombs will not be falling on those we love. It was not so many years ago.
I was a child during the war years, living here in Canada nearly immune to the aspects of war that touched my parents. They saw my older brother run off to war but all I saw was a boy in a kilt, trying to grow a mustache. I heard the war songs and as the years flew by, learned to jive with the rest of the gang. The afternoon movies showed scenes of the war but it was so far removed from our everyday life. And the war movies that we saw were of course “fantasies” in our eyes . We were no different than the children of today who probably feel the same way about many of the violent films they see. Of course there was absolute silence in the house when the “news” was on and I remember innocently asking my mom what there would be on the news once the war was over. And eventually it was…the local fire siren screamed, horns honked and staid neighbours almost danced across the road to shake hands.
During those long years I had carried on a correspondence with my older brother. He eventually came home, looking much older with a heavy scar over his temple where he had been wounded. He wasn’t sure what to do with this nearly grown up girl who had been no more than a “squirt” when he left. Some years later, his war wounds eventually claimed him but I when I see his writing on the flyleaf of books he sent me, I am reminded on his ongoing faithfulness in writing me.
So I look across my sea of poppies, then bow my head as the Last Post is played. Because of him and his friends, I am here….in Canada, taking for granted all the things of life in a country that has so many freedoms and I ask God to keep us mindful of the price paid and to share with others the blessing that have been showered on this county of Canada.
