Friday, July 25, 2025
Feast of Saint James, Apostle
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Veteran
Command that these two sons of mine sit,
one at your right and the other at your left, in your Kingdom.”
Jesus said in reply,
“You do not know what you are asking.
In June my friend Ron accepted the offer of an “honor flight.” Now in July we are seated across from each other at breakfast, this veteran of the Korean War and me. We are nearly the same age, but my high-enough draft number kept me out of the army. Not Ron. When he was drafted he considered emigrating to Canada. But he was married with a baby, so he kept his family in the USA and spent his military time in South Korea.
During the day-long trip with a group of other veterans to DC monuments and cemeteries, Ron and another man who was wheelchair-bound traveled with a “guardian,” a woman who has accompanied veterans many times over the years, paying for her own flight each time. She sounded like a guardian angel, really.
On the way home his guardian surprised him with a large stack of letters from his family and friends. He began reading and then looked up at his angel. “I don’t know if I can get through this,” he told her. This morning remembering, he wept again. His voice broke a little.
“When I came home I avoided wearing my uniform. So many blamed me and other soldiers like me for the war, like it was our fault we were there.”
Now the letters that he did not receive fifty years ago were placed in his lap to read on the plane ride home. At both airports the vets got red carpet treatment, and at the end of the day they walked into the lobby at Abraham Lincoln Capitol Airport in Springfield, where a throng of grateful people cheered and clapped for them and shouted out their names. He just could hardly believe it.
“Over fifty years later Kathy and I both felt closure that we couldn’t get back then.” Ron moved on to a master’s degree in operatic performance at the University of Illinois and to a varied career as a singer, accountant and carpenter-contractor, reviving old houses (like ours), creating room-size masterpieces out of wood, and sharing his faith in countless ways with countless people. Now Ron and Kathy can rest easier in their memories – resentments and regrets softened.
Ron has always been able to find goodness in people, recognize and create beauty in the world around him, and seek truth in ways that don’t demand that others agree with him. He felt recognized and appreciated by this “honor flight,” and humbled too. I am so happy for him.
A few decades ago I shared a Promise Keepers’ weekend with Ron and his son Dan. Dan, who by now is edging into his 50’s, is about to begin his own military life as a chaplain.
Wow!
We hold this treasure in earthen vessels,
that the surpassing power may be of God and not from us.
We are afflicted in every way, but not constrained;
perplexed, but not driven to despair;
persecuted, but not abandoned;
struck down, but not destroyed;
always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus,
so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body.
(2 Corinthians 4, Psalm 126, John 15, Matthew 20)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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