Making Memorial Day More

Don't you always want to make more out of Memorial Day? I don't mean more days off or additional time at the grill, but to have something to DO to commemorate the freedom we enjoy because men and women in the military sacrificed their lives fighting for our country.

If you're like me, you don't want today merely to act as a trigger to start wearing white pants and sunscreen; you want to pause, reflect, and give thanks. You want to show some respect and acknowledge courage, sacrifice, and bravery.

I'm just not sure what to DO. I want some guidance around HOW to remember.

Maybe I'm alone in this awkward space.

Still, as I gave the idea some thought, I recalled one of the shortest and most famous speeches ever given was at a battle ground, a cemetery, by Abraham Lincoln.  In fact, the 271 words of The Gettysburg Address perfectly addresses the meaning behind every life lost defending our nation.

So if you don't know how to commemorate today, soak in these words spoken in a Pennsylvania field in 1863:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

What to do this Memorial Day?

If we take a page from President Lincoln, we should honor the dead by being more devoted to the cause "for which they gave the last full measure of devotion...that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom."

Something worth remembering indeed.