Some Day At Christmas

Am I living a life that is worth another American dying for it?  

It’s a heavy question I’ve never considered in that exact way before in my 48 years of life. 

Yet it’s a question that has stayed with me for several weeks since I saw it in a poem at Pearl Harbor Hawaii.  

There is a large wall plaque along the water that is inscribed with a poem that Eleanor Roosevelt carried with her every day during World War 2.  It reads: 

“Dear Lord, lest I continue my complacent way, help me to remember, somehow out there, a man died for me today.  As long as there be war, then I must ask and answer, am I worth dying for?”

If you know me, you know I’m someone who has had a lifelong reverence for our servicemen and women, who is guided by that reverence and tries to honor their sacrifices in my daily life.  

I was also raised Catholic and had it drilled into my brain that Jesus died for all of us, but up until I saw that plaque at Pearl Harbor, the other version I had thought most about the last 25 years was Tom Hanks’ line at the end of Saving Private Ryan. 

His character tells Matt Damon’s Private Ryan with his dying words to “earn this”, and decades later a much older Ryan asks his wife in the Normandy cemetery to tell him that he’s a good man, that he’s lived a good life.  

Of course it should not matter whether or not our country is actively at war or not before we start to think daily about the sacrifices others have gone through for us, but the point is clear…none of us have accomplished anything in life without the contributions of countless others, many of which occurred long before we were born.   

Each and every one of us truly stands on the shoulders of heroes, from our parents, to our teachers, our friends, our relatives, to our men and women in uniform, to strangers on the streets.  

Pay it forward. Be a good human. Contribute positively to society. Leave this blue marble better than you found it.

In this month where so many are celebrating holidays that bring out the best in humanity, peace on earth, and good will toward all, I cannot help but wish that I could get everyone to think even deeper and ask themselves if the rest of the year they are living a life worth dying for.  

And maybe, as the Stevie Wonder song says, some day at Christmas we will not fail, hate and fear will be gone, and love will prevail.