FOUR TIMES I HAVE BEEN THERE

Hello again, Dick Futh, the stories from the road. There is a place that inspires the heart and chills the mind from my perspective. Four times I've been there, once with friends, once with an adult daughter and twice with teenage grandsons. We stood there on beaches, you know, those beaches of history in Normandy, France. Not French names, but names like Utah, Omaha, Juno, Gold, Sword. Those Normandy beaches speak to me. They're like pages in the book of world history that document one moment in time that was populated by what would later be called the greatest generation. On those pages, on those sandy pages, freedom was writ large, written in the lifeblood of thousands of young men, and as I've stood there those times, I try to imagine what it must have been like, one horrific day, 79 years ago this past week, June 6, 1944, the largest invasion force in the history of mankind, 160,000 young men on a 50-mile front, 11,000 planes, 5,000 ships and boats of all kinds, and as the sun set across the English Channel to the West that day, more than 4,000 of our young men and Western allies, and about the same of the enemy, would never see another sunrise, have dreams shattered by bullets and mines, family bloodlines ended. And those who love them, who are left with seepia photographs and high school sports letter jackets and memories of what might have been. You say you're being a bit model in nature, I mean it's almost morbid, I like the way Andy Rooney, the former CBS correspondent and a war correspondent, in that day who landed on Utah Beach on June 8th of that year, how he put it in his words from my war. There have only been a handful of days since the beginning of time on which the direction the world was taking, have been changed for the better in one 24-hour period by an act of man. June 6, 1944 was one of them. What the Americans, the British and the Canadians were trying to do was get back a whole continent that had been taken from its rightful owners and whose citizens had been taken captive by Adolf Hitler's German army. It was one of the most monumentally unselfish things that one group of people ever did for another. Monumentally unselfish things. Sounds like what we've been talking about these last weeks, sounds like love to me. Well, when you walk through the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach, you know some, some of you know the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan, that cemetery. It's geometric patterns, hundreds of precise rows of crosses or stars of David. And every now and again, these words are on a cross. Your rests in honored glory, a comrade in arms known but to God. Someone unable to be identified by name, but singularly as a comrade in the battle, whose name now is called by the creator of the universe. Who's earthly house lies there in that grave? A 19 year old farm boy or city kid called to duty, whether articulated or not, whether it was said this way or not, I believe that young man died loving freedom and fighting for it. Fighting for the freedom to speak, to gather, to worship, to create freedom, not to be afraid, or the freedom to love, highest calling. There are words of Jesus of Nazareth that adhere to my heart, that are that he spoke at the end of his earthly life. And this is how he defines love. Your love has no one than this to lay down one's life for one's friends. Many veterans of foreign wars have said this over the years that I wasn't fighting for flag and country as great as that might be, but I was fighting for the ones who were beside me for my buddies and for my friends. Or as a huge overwhelming thing, love is a particular thing. We are free because of young men like that in that place on that day and I am so grateful. We close stories from the road this day by paying them tribute. I for one want to live worthy of their sacrifice, God bless.