From Memorial Day 2024, and Charles Spurgeon on the worker's day of rest.

Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand… (Romans 14:4)

Every man's way is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the hearts.(Proverbs 21:2)

A day past the soldier's holiday, or the soldier's day of remembrance, we come to our work with tools in hand, and bread in our basket, as Emerson or Thoreau said.

I was thinking of something Charles Haddon Spurgeon said about these holidays, and famously, Boxing Day, in response to talk of the holiday being silly and pointless.  He said something to the effect that he did not begrudge the workers of the nation a day of rest, and likewise, the citizen soldier of the free world, contesting for peace by means of threat of violence, getting their own day of gratitude and remembrance.

We remember and we say "rest easy, good soldier"--soldiering being that most difficult of employments, undertaken by anyone able-bodied, for the sake of the most important of causes: those so often fresh-faced young adults sent into the meat-grinder, charnal churn and moral uncertainty of warfare.

 

Sin-debt and the camouflaged butterfly: the story of one dishonered soldier.

He had suffered a moment of cowardice during the Iraq Conflict, subsequently went AWOL.  He was, inside himself, embarrassed, despite the fact that his commanders took a rosier view of the matter, and granted him an Honorable Discharge.

He had, due to logistics, missed out on the usual starting of a family, but in time, he took up with a fatherless family and loved them as his own.  He had found a group of people near his same point in the path of life, but a group that needed a father and husband, when he so much felt the need to be a father and a husband.

The sin-debt of cowardice bore down on him like the massive pressure on a giant dam, as of thousands of pounds, or pounds uncounted, constantly pushing against the earthen wall.

But something unexpected happened.

Through regular old toil and the odd moments with his loved ones, in a thousand little ways, he worked his penance, as if were a Catholic instead of a Southern Baptist.

The sin-debt weighed on him all his life, such that he didn't notice that one day, his spirit had went from caterpillar to butterfly.  The sin-debt was gone, but maybe it was his own consciousness of the prior sin-debt, just a bad memory, that kept him pushing forward in his life.