From Memorial Day 2024, and Charles Spurgeon on the worker's day of rest.

Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand… (Romans 14:4)

Every man's way is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the hearts.(Proverbs 21:2)

A day past the soldier's holiday, or the soldier's day of remembrance, we come to our work with tools in hand, and bread in our basket, as Emerson or Thoreau said.

I was thinking of something Charles Haddon Spurgeon said about these holidays, and famously, Boxing Day, in response to talk of the holiday being silly and pointless.  He said something to the effect that he did not begrudge the workers of the nation a day of rest, and likewise, the citizen soldier of the free world, contesting for peace by means of threat of violence, getting their own day of gratitude and remembrance.

We remember and we say "rest easy, good soldier"--soldiering being that most difficult of employments, undertaken by anyone able-bodied, for the sake of the most important of causes: those so often fresh-faced young adults sent into the meat-grinder, charnal churn and moral uncertainty of warfare.