Sparrow Moments

Okay, it has been more than a month since I've written anything, and that's just ridiculous.  I realize I have no one to blame but myself, and I'm sure none of you have been holding your breath waiting for a new post from me, but still, I'm sorry about that.  If for some reason you have been holding your breath, then I'm even sorrier.  I really do want to be more regular at writing on here!  This post has been rolling around in my head for weeks (as you'll see), and I'm finally getting around to posting it.  So here it is: the moment you all have been waiting for!  And by "you all," I mean me.

A few weeks ago (when I started writing, it was only one week ago...pitiful!) I visited Arlington National Cemetery with a good friend and her family.  She and I had been wanting to go to Arlington for a while, and we finally made it on a scorchy 95-degree day, which is a cold and clammy memory compared to the 115-degree monsters we had last week!  Despite the heat and crowds, it was fascinating to be there and definitely worth the visit.  Acres of meticulously groomed lawns, with graves arranged in perfect rows, columns, and diagonals that would have made many a marching band director proud. 

I could have wandered through them for hours, wondering about each of the men and women whose names were written in stone.  Old graves and battlefields stir up a distant longing in me to know each name, each person who had a whole life, but all I know of them is their death and the stone in front of me. It's easy for me to become calloused to this, to overlook the reality of people that I don't personally know, so I make a point of stopping to think about these names and their stories.  I imagine them and their lives, what they might have lived through given the dates of their birth and death; I compare their ages when they died to people I do know personally, and it becomes much more serious to me when I put these lives into perspective with my own. 

I think about this kind of thing a lot when I am in cities, riding public transportation, or in big crowds.  Each of these people around me has a whole life.  They all have minds full of thoughts, places they are going, people they love and miss, things they are dreading.  The only thing we have in common is this one, briefest of moments, when perhaps we both want our train to arrive on time.  And yet, our amazing and wonderful God knows each one of us, personally and deeply.  He loves us and cares to know those thoughts, dreads, loves and sorrows.  I can be so caught up in my self-centered thoughts or ambitions, barely realizing the reality of another's life passing right in front of me, because it has nothing to do with me.   And yet God has chosen to love me!  I want to love the people around me like He does, without myself as the center.  I pondered all of this walking past the graves, people whose moments on this earth are finished.  One day my own will be too, and will I have spent them on myself alone? 

This was my sparrow moment.  Then we came here:

The Tomb of the Unknowns, perhaps the most famous place in a famous cemetery.  You can't see it from the low-quality phone photo, but engraved on the front of this tomb are these words:

Here rests in

honored glory

an American

soldier

known but to God

Soldiers guard this tomb 24 hours a day in any weather, and these sentinels are an elite group.  The changing of the guard ceremony is famous, and it was sobering to see the structured care that was taken over this tomb, and I couldn't help but think of the structured care God takes of me.  As I sat there in the shade, sweating in my sleeveless top and flip-flops, I watched a man, whose name none of us knew, march in the sun.  He wore a black, long-sleeved uniform and a black hat, and marched back and forth in perfect counts of 21, to honor a soldier no one knows. 

A soldier, in fact, "known but to God," which is what finally hit me.  Being made and known and loved by God is what makes each of these people important, what makes me not the point, and the reason we can hope in Jesus.  He knows us, He loves us, and He has saved us, through His perfect, structured care.  As much care, planning, and dedication as I saw go into a ceremony for a nameless man, it pales in comparison to the God's care for each of us.  To everyone I pass on the street, I am simply another pair of unknown eyes, and yet God has chosen to love me.  Sparrow moments for sure.