Pray for Peace
Veterans Day is this Thursday, and the annual parade is back! The parade begins at Montebello and Central at 11 am on 11/11, and your family can come and honor our veterans in person. If you cannot make it, you can pay your respects from home by observing two minutes of silence beginning at 11 am. If you’d like to deepen your experience, we invite you to take note of all of the 11s in the preceding sentences, and use them to guide your observance of this day.
In 1968, when the Uniform Holiday was passed that moved many American holidays to a Monday (everyone loves a three-day weekend), Veterans Day was moved as well. But within a decade it had been moved back to November 11 in order to preserve the significance of the date: the commemoration of Armistice Day, the day the peace treaty was signed ending WWI. Through this lens, we can view Veterans Day as not only a day to honor those who go to war, but also to honor the creation and preservation of peace. You can read more about this piece of history here.
In that spirit, we encourage you to honor the spirit of the day by creating your own prayers for peace. There are lots of other people’s prayers out there, and you can read some of them together if you’d like, but it’s more powerful to come up with your own. So talk about who can help create peace in the world, and who you’d like to include in your prayers. It is truly possible for all of us to contribute to peace, so perhaps your kids would like to include specific people they know, or our leaders, or maybe even themselves. Then decide what to say – what would you like God to give them? Or help them do? Or forgive them for doing?
There’s no “formula” for how to do this the right way, so try to guide the young people in your family without composing their prayers FOR them. You can send these prayers up on Veterans Day – or the next day, or the next week...because no matter when you’d like to bring more peace to the world, the world will absolutely need it.
How else will your family be honoring Veterans Day? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram!
