Until I started blogging regularly, I never thought much about the origins of national holidays. My wife and I always celebrated Easter and Christmas with more vigor because of our faith but have tried to make Thanksgiving and days like Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day, and July 4th more meaningful by connecting with veterans, or looking up historical speeches and stories and incorporating them in the observances.

Part of why we do that is because we want our kids, and their kids, to remember why we as a nation set these days aside. Schools certainly don’t do a great job of passing along the history and traditions of our culture. It’s up to individual families—parents, really, and fathers, specifically—to make holidays more than just a day off to get more work done or to lounge at the pool.

But to meaningfully pass them along, you need to know the history of them yourself.

Our modern Memorial Day finds its roots in the aftermath of the American Civil War, when citizens would strew flowers on the graves of both Union and Confederate dead. One of the earliest accounts of the practice was from May 1865, a month following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the formal end of hostilities between North and South.

In May 1865, just after the war ended, a large procession was held in the ruined city of Charleston, S.C. There, thousands of Black Americans, many of whom had been enslaved until the city was liberated just months earlier, commemorated the lives of Union captives buried in a mass grave at a former racecourse. The service was led by some 3,000 schoolchildren carrying roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Hundreds of women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses, according to historical accounts.

The observance was formalized three years later on May 5, 1868, by Maj. Gen. John A. Logan, who led the Grand Army of the Republic (an organization of Union veterans), calling for a national holiday to remember the Civil War dead on May 30.

Originally called “Decoration Day,” the annual observance broadened after World War I to include all troops who had fallen serving the country, not just those of the Civil War. In 1971, Memorial Day was declared a national holiday by an act of Congress to be observed on the last Monday in May. On it we take “pride in the valor of those who gave their lives in the cause of freedom, and sorrow that such self-sacrifice should have been necessary.”

There are two details about Memorial Day I was unaware of until doing the research for this post. First, the intended focus of Memorial Day is not just remembering and being grateful for those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedoms, although that is important. Its original focus was “prayer for a permanent peace.”

I was surprised to discover that prayer was, and is, the express focus of Memorial Day. Our government is “calling on the people of the United States” to pray on the last Monday of May each year. We’re being invited by those who we elect to lead us to pray for a permanent peace.

As a Christian, I’m challenged by this charge. While government is not the Church, shouldn’t we believers be the first to respond to the call to prayer? Which leads me to the second thing I discovered.

Note that under (b)(2) and (b)(3) there is to be a designated time for prayer, and we are to “unite in prayer at that time.” I didn’t know this, but that time is 3:00 p.m. local and is called “The National Moment of Remembrance.”

Not only has our government invited us to pray, but it specifically set a time to be united in prayer for a permanent peace.

Today I will cease all other activity at 3:00 p.m. local time and pray for a permanent peace. I will also thank God for the men and women who have served in our armed forces and have selflessly fought to keep our enemies at arm’s length and to preserve the peace here in our homeland.

Gen. Logan set the precedent in his order establishing Decoration Day.

Gen. Logan’s order for his posts to decorate graves in 1868 “with the choicest flowers of springtime” urged: “We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance. … Let pleasant paths invite the coming and going of reverent visitors and fond mourners. Let no neglect, no ravages of time, testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.”

What could be more important than that? Our freedom is precious, and it comes at a price — a price that we pray we never have to pay — unless we must. And if we must, we will then remember those who valiantly fought to protect and preserve the peace for those of us who enjoy those freedoms today.

I invite you to join me.