We flew to Dallas, Texas, this past weekend for the wedding of our son’s good buddy from Myers Park High School. Jay teaches Sunday School at 28,000-member Prestonwood Baptist Church (they grow their churches mighty big in Texas). His bride, Holly, is a lovely young woman who graduated from Baylor, and their wedding weekend was rich in faith. Saturday night at the party, Jay joked that no one would tell the Southern Baptist preachers the next morning if everyone got up and danced. Friday night at the rehearsal dinner, there was all manner of good-natured ribbing about Jay. But mixed in with the traditional needling were tender comments about what a godly man he is. That was neat to hear about a kid who was always around when our boys were just starting to become men. It was nice to see God play such a pivotal role all through a weekend of wedding revelry.

But that’s not all I wanted to share about our weekend in Big D. I want to see where you stand on a cosmic issue that came up Saturday morning as Sharon and I debated whether to visit The Sixth Floor Museum. E-mail me at ken@mpumc.org and share: Are you like me, fascinated by the past and eager to relive it even if it hurts? Or are you like my wife, who didn’t need to be reminded of JFK’s assassination to keep the memory and the lessons alive?

I deferred to Sharon (as usual!), and so we drove past The Sixth Floor Museum without going in – that’s the old book depository, of course, from which Lee Harvey Oswald was said to have fired the shots that killed the president. It’s a riveting museum that takes you moment by moment through November 22, 1963. Your heart will skip a beat when you come to the window from which Oswald was believed to have changed the course of history. Nearly as riveting is Dealey Plaza outside, where tourists flock to examine where a mystery gunman, if there was one, might have waited on the so-called grassy knoll.

I had visited the museum on a newspaper assignment to Dallas years ago and written a column for The Charlotte Observer calling it America’s version of a shrine. It is a place we must preserve, always remember and frequently visit, so that we never forget the impact that madness and evil can have on a people.

Sacred ground, I called it.

But Sharon says we don’t have to be smacked in the face by the past to remember it, that we can honor sacred ground without having to walk on it again and again. We can honor the lessons without forcing ourselves to go through the pain.

As we headed back to the hotel to rest up before the wedding where even Southern Baptists danced, we craned our necks to get a good look at the window in the old book depository. We saw the tourists studying the grassy knoll. Then we drove onto the Texas interstate, looking forward to the joy that awaited.

Had we done enough to honor sacred ground?