Sunday, November 13, 2022

The Lament - Remembrance Day Sunday

 The Sermon today concentrated on lament and it was a perfect discussion of the loss that Canada as a nation has experienced on too many occasions. The young blood of our nation spilled to free people from tyranny in far off places. It is still happening today in the Ukraine. We want peace not so desperately that we will let ourselves be trampled upon but we do want peace. A place where knowledge can flourish; children can grown up in an atmosphere where fear is diminished. All of this is possible if greed could only disappear from the face of the earth. 

The online Church Service is perhaps the one that I would most have liked to attend in person and yet I do not. I am not sure that I will ever return; I barely go anywhere but yet I feel as if I have been everywhere. Edward and I did do a great deal of traveling. He reveled in traveling around Eastern/Central Canada and the Eastern States of the United States of America. We barely arrived home and we were off again to find yet another tombstone or reminder of his ancestors. He loved all of that research and it became his great quest as he aged. From the time I first knew him he had an interest in his Kipp family and with some prodding from his mother and maternal uncle this extended into his mother's family Link and Allen. His interest in his paternal grandmother Schultz's family arose suddenly although he had been keeping records of that family but it was a planned trip to Salt Lake City and a discovery of a marriage between a Schultz and a Nieman that prompted his going to a Schultz Family Reunion the summer before going to Salt Lake City and then he was into Schultz as he made great discoveries at the Reunion that let him pursue a line of research that finally worked and that was aided by a person knowledgeable in German Ancestry at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. 

The Naval Memorial in Plymouth overwhelmed at first sight when we were there in 2008. So many names but the British Isles paid dearly in lives during both the First and the Second World Wars. The Memorial is on The Hoe which looks over Plymouth Sound. We were staying at a Hotel nearby and we were able to visit this Memorial a couple of times. Just this one memorial commemorates 7,251 sailors of the First World War and 15,933 sailors of the Second World War. There are three of these large Naval Memorials (amongst many others across the British Isles) this one at Plymouth, one at Chatham and the third at Portsmouth. I also was at the Naval Memorial at Portsmouth later in this tour and also saw the Memorial at Chatham. These huge obelisks can be seen from the water as well at all three of the sites and we did have a boat tour at Plymouth. We in Canada had so many lost but so many more were lost in the British Isles and all over Europe. Never again; we must keep supplying Ukraine with munitions so that they can finish this war against Russia and hopefully it will be the last. One prays that for sure. 

Some work on DNA a little later. It is a day that I do tend to devote to contemplation about God in our world.

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