Honor Their Sacrifice

Today, Community Renewal Society (CRS) remembers those who gave their lives in service to this nation.

As CRS Executive Director Rev. Dr. Waltrina N. Middleton wrote in Protect the Dream,“We owe it to our ancestors who carried blood-stained banners and sacrificed the unimaginable for freedom to ring from every valley and mountaintop for us all.” 

Memorial Day reminds us that freedom has always come at great cost. It calls us not only to remember sacrifice, but to consider how we honor it. Is it with courage, compassion, and a continued commitment to justice and peace?

President Abraham Lincoln described such sacrifice as “the last full measure of devotion,” a phrase that continues to shape how we honor fallen service members and all who gave their lives in service to others.

Scripture echoes that same spirit in John 15:13: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

And as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. often reminded the nation, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” drawing from the words of abolitionist minister Theodore Parker generations earlier. Their words remind us that the pursuit of justice is carried forward across generations, and that each generation is called to do its part.

May we not grow weary. May we remain faithful. And may we continue striving toward a future worthy of what was given.

 In Remembrance,

Franchelle Brown-Stanford
Manager of Development and Communications

And the staff of Community Renewal Society