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.
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.
Wow. That certainly puts things into perspective, doesn't it? We've talked about that stuff before, but never that far...and I love it. Thanks for this!
ReplyDeleteHow He loves the greatest and the least of us! Awesome.
ReplyDeleteWow! That's huge. Thank you!
ReplyDeleteYou've reminded us to look behind the eyes we pass to consider the lives each represent. We are but a vapor in the wind, but so, so precious to God. Isn't that mind-boggling?
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