Lest we forget

I've had this blog in my head for nearly 6 months now; since a visit to the National Memorial Arboretum. I guess it falls under the category of random ramblings from my soap box!

We went to the National Memorial Arboretum and wondered round all the beautiful memorials. The sadness just gets you, if you let it.

There's one memorial to the Prisoners of War in Burma; and pictures of the brutal treatment that they received, which just made me realise the true meaning of 'Lest we forget'. Because we are starting to lose the generation who experienced war atrocities first hand, we are losing the people who lost loved ones. We are losing the people who knew what it was to ration. We are losing the people who stood in the trenches, with the fear of a gun behind them and fear of death infront of them. We are losing the generation of people who saw what human beings in the right circumstances are capable of.

We say don't we, that humans are the only animals who kill their own. See how the Bible says, "The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?" How God knows the human heart. And the generation of people who witnessed this first hand are starting to fade out. Their children are growing old, and the current generation have no knowledge of what devestation greed and ambition can bring.

Hear's a quote from a film I watched the other day:-
"When did ambition cease to be a sin and become something we all aspire to"

They are still finding bones in Flanders fields in Belgium. The farmers who harvest those fields, dump them at the end of the road, and special trucks come and carry them away. And yes, the horror of it grabs you - but I present to you a worse thought - what about when they stop finding the bones? What happens when there is no real and present reminder of the horrors of war. What happens when we forget?

How long before we stop with the memorial services, how long before the world is moving so fast that we cannot stop for 2 minutes to remember?

Life is cheap in our society. A 'life sentence' for committing murder, sometimes lasts only 8 years. 8 years for a human life - how we cheapen it. We are made in the image of God; and yet we have natural hearts that live for the devil. Wouldn't the devil love us to forget.

Jesus Christ, son of God, Saviour of the world, knows our frailty and our weakness, He knows our propensity to forget. He left us the Commmunion/Lord's Supper, to remind us of the New Covenant of Salvation in Christ alone; to remind us of His death on the cross - why? Lest we forget!



www.thenma.org.uk