This morning’s word is What the Poppy Remembers.
The anchor verse is John 15:13.
“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
Memorial Day weekend has begun.
By Monday morning, small towns and large cities across this country will hold ceremonies, lay wreaths, read names, and stand for taps. Some people will wear a small red flower pinned to a lapel or a hat. Most people who see the poppy will know it means remembrance. Fewer people will know how the poppy got there.
It started with a woman named Moina Michael. She was working at Columbia University in New York City in November 1918, two days before the armistice that ended World War I. She was on duty for a YMCA conference. She had a few minutes between things. She picked up a copy of Ladies’ Home Journal and read a poem she had read before. In Flanders Fields, by John McCrae. A poem about red poppies blooming in the soil of battlefields where soldiers were buried.
The last verse stopped her. “To you from failing hands we throw the Torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders Fields.”
She wrote her own poem in response, right there at her desk. She called it We Shall Keep the Faith. Then she got up and walked through the streets of New York looking for red silk poppies to wear. She found twenty-four of them at Wanamaker’s Department Store. She bought all of them. She gave them to the soldiers and civilians at the conference. She wore one herself. From that day until she died in 1944, she wore a red poppy as a sign of remembrance and a promise to keep the faith with those who had died.
She did not have a budget. She did not have a marketing plan. She did not have institutional backing. She had a poem, twenty-four silk flowers, and a conviction that the dead must not be forgotten. She wrote letters. She visited offices. She showed up. By the spring of 1919 the Flanders Fields Memorial Campaign was underway. By the years that followed, veterans’ groups in nearly every country that had lost soldiers in the Great War had adopted the red poppy. Moina Michael became known as the Poppy Lady. The poppies you see this weekend trace back to her desk at Columbia, that copy of Ladies’ Home Journal, and a decision made in a few quiet minutes between things.
What the poppy remembers is not only the dead. It remembers what one person can begin with very little, when that person decides not to break faith.
This weekend, if you stand at a cemetery, or in front of a memorial wall, or beside a flag at half-staff, you are standing inside a tradition that one woman started with a poem and twenty-four silk flowers. That tradition has carried the names of millions of dead for more than a hundred years. It has done so without ever once requiring you to have a budget, a platform, or permission.
The world says the small things do not count. The poppy says they do. The poppy says one person, one minute, one decision to keep the faith, can outlast wars and generations and even the memory of the one who started it.
That is what you carry into Memorial Day weekend. Not the obligation to do something grand. The freedom to do one small faithful thing, in front of GOD and in honor of those who did not come home, and to trust that small faithful things outlast the people who do them.
If you wear a poppy this weekend, wear it knowing what it is. A promise. Not to forget. Not to break faith. Not to pretend the cost was nothing.
And if you do not wear a poppy, you can still stand somewhere quiet this weekend and remember someone whose life cost something. You can read a name. You can light a candle. You can pray.
The Spirit was on them when they went. The Spirit is on us when we remember.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.