Home of the Brave

I have just this moment come from the TV where I saw a picture that moved me of a group of health care workers in their gowns and gloves and face shields waiting together to receive an ambulance, obviously transporting an ill person to their hospital. The first thought that came to my mind was that’s the “home of the brave” right there. 

I cannot imagine the fears and anxieties that confront those who must make the decision each day to go to work, where they are desperately needed and in the face of risks to their own health and the well-being of their own families because of the shortages of the needed personal protective equipment. Here is bravery on full display for all to see. 

We are accustomed after 18 years of war, to acknowledging the courage of those few citizens who serve in our armed forces. We have heard of and read about the unfathomably close bond that unites those who have shared such hardship over and over again in places like Iraq Afghanistan and other far off countries and before in Vietnam. Now the number of our fellow citizens who will know that bond that comes from the shared experience of palpable risk, grows as exponentially as the number of infected persons.

They are not ordinary people. They are extraordinary people and as Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem, they set their faces to live out their calling and do their duty. Pray for them and their safety earnestly, for it is an inescapable fact some of them will lose their lives and “in it (they) shall be rememberéd.”

It is a good time to recall the prayer in the second stanza of our National Anthem:

            O Thus be it ever

When free men (and women) shall stand

            Between their loved homes 

            And the war’s desolation.