Saturday, July 04, 2009

This past week

This past week has been quite busy from returning from leave to prepare for a high visibility funeral, to arranging for my move to Korea, and more. We had the staff over one morning for an early morning breakfast to celebrate our boss's birthday. It was a beautiful quite morning with birds singing and was quite a nice and relaxing time together. But a few hours later we were hopping for a major funeral.

I had the incredible honor of facilitating chaplain functions for the funeral for Major General David Wherley and his wife Ann who were victims in the DC metro train crash last week. You can read a bit about the service here. These two were incredible people. He was the former commanding officer for the DC National Guard and was responsible for scrambling fighter cover over DC during 9/11. You can learn more about them from a very nice site the DC Guard has put together here. It was a huge ceremony. I went out to await the arrival of the family by formal procession and already Memorial Drive which leads into the cemetery was triple stacked with vehicles for the ceremony. This was easily the largest funeral I have seen held at Arlington in my two years of serving there.