Dear friends,
Good
oratory is hard to find these days, but one president was probably the best,
Pres. Ronald Reagan. A trained speaker, Reagan became a wordsmith of phrases.
This speech was given on Memorial Day, 1982, at Arlington National Cemetery.
Regardless of your political affiliation, I am sure you will find his thoughts
appropriate for this day.
“Once each May, amid the quiet hills and rolling lanes
and breeze-brushed trees of Arlington National Cemetery, far above the majestic
Potomac and the monuments and memorials of our Nation’s Capital just beyond,
the graves of America's military dead are decorated with the beautiful flag
that in life these brave souls followed and loved. This scene is repeated
across our land and around the world, wherever our defenders rest. Let us hold
it our sacred duty and our inestimable privilege on this day to decorate these
graves ourselves -- with a fervent prayer and a pledge of true allegiance to
the cause of liberty, peace, and country for which America’s own have ever
served and sacrificed.
“Our pledge and our prayer this day are those of free men
and free women who know that all we hold dear must constantly be built up,
fostered, revered and guarded vigilantly from those in every age who seek its
destruction. We know, as have our Nation’s defenders down through the years,
that there can never be peace without its essential elements of liberty,
justice and independence. Those true and only building blocks of peace were the
lone and lasting cause and hope and prayer that lighted the way of those whom
we honor and remember this Memorial Day. To keep faith with our hallowed dead,
let us be sure, and very sure, today and every day of our lives, that we keep
their cause, their hope, their prayer, forever our country’s own.”
America was
founded 239 years ago on Christian principles of law and justice. All who seek
to change this fact are denying the basis for the gifts God has given us in
this nation and are imperiling the freedoms so long fought for. May we always
be led by those who would never deny the God of the Holy Bible.
May we ever be vigilant to protect those Godly principles,
Rev. Bob Tasler
www.bobtasler.com
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