Veterans Day makes me think about my grandpa’s faded bald eagle tattoo on his shoulder and the crisp flag waving in his front yard. I picture the antique uniforms, helmets and sepia-toned photos of his father and his father’s father that decorate his house. I think back to birthdays and holidays when my own father wasn’t home. I remember making paper chains with my siblings to count down the days until he returned, and the bright yellow ribbons hanging on neighbors’ doors and on trees in their front yards telling the world they were waiting for someone to come home, too. I even remember hearing about kids whose dads never came home at all.

As I’ve grown up, I have found myself having to work much harder to recall these memories and experience any sort of reverent feeling on Veterans Day. For myself, and for many Americans, it can be just another day that kids get off from school and we get off from work (if we’re lucky). 

How come it can be so easy to breeze past the significance?

We are not all veterans nor immediately related to a veteran. While that may incite a huge “duh,” I think we can learn something important about how putting one’s life on the line can alter a person’s experience of something far more important than our nationality—our faith.

What if the reason people forget about Veterans Day is the same reason many of us are so casual about our faith? We are rarely called to lay down our lives for it. 

Veterans Day means something to my grandfather because, as a soldier, he was asked to be prepared to lay down his life for his country in war. As a nonveteran, the closest thing I can imagine is being called to lay down my life for my faith. For some believers outside of this country, that is everyday life. For Americans, it’s all too easy to fall into a passive, consumer faith that we only lean into when we feel like it. 

“Consumerist faith often starts in kids’ church and youth group with students sensing that their only requirements are to be there and sit there, without emphasizing any need to participate,” says Clayton Ganziano, First Free’s middle school coordinator. “That’s not what we’re about here.”

“When we see a student who really understands Jesus, they have a whole new idea of participation. They’re asking huge questions and they have a new courage and freedom to live differently in front of their friends. That courage gives them an open door to share Jesus with their friends. 

How might God be calling you to lay down your life today? 

Whether it’s being brave enough to invite your non-believing family members to pray together before Thanksgiving dinner or inviting your neighbors to attend Christmas Traditions or Christmas Eve service here at First Free—let the veterans we honor today inspire us to be unashamed of the gospel and unafraid to lay ourselves down so that others might discover it.