life – Lisa J Radcliff ~ Finding Freedom from the Past

In the spring of 1945, high school seniors were being drafted into the Army. My dad was a senior that year and was willing to join the war effort but not willing to join the Army. So, he dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Navy on May 23, 1945.

I have a shoebox full of letters between him and my grandmother from bootcamp to discharge, all in perfect cursive and complete sentences—it’s hard to believe he was just a seventeen-year-old boy. One of her letters described the Vesper Service on June 3, 1945. She wrote, “You know I felt very bad that you couldn’t be with your own original class to graduate. That’s a big disappointment. I am sending you the program. The choir did not sing a bit good. You know why, because you weren’t in it. The sermon was terrible. It did not even seem like a sermon. You know why everything was so bad because you weren’t in the class. See you really rate, you dear thing.” He really did have an excellent voice with perfect pitch.

His time in the Navy took him all over the world. He described Aruba as a hot wasteland no one would ever want to visit! I guess there was no tourist industry on that island in the 1940s. He was in awe of a newly commissioned aircraft carrier that his ship was docked next to in the Caribbean. It was the USS Midway. He went to Europe and the South Seas before being discharged in June 1946. The war was over. It was time to send the boys home.

By this time, his father had died, and his mother had to go to work. She wasn’t able to keep their beautiful home, described as the most beautiful home in town back then. When Dad arrived at home, he needed a job but didn’t have a high school diploma. He earned his GED and went to work for the US Post Office, but it always bothered him that he wasn’t awarded a diploma because he left school two weeks before graduation.

As part of a Veteran’s Day celebration, North Penn School District awarded my dad (and four other veterans) their diplomas last night. It comes eighty years later than it should have and twenty-seven years after his death. But he would be grateful—that’s just how he was. Gentle, kind, patient, a Navy veteran, and now a high school graduate.

Does your life ever feel monochrome? Gray? Boring, lacking color or vibrancy? That’s what I thought about as I looked out at the scene before me. Gray rocks, gray water, gray sky. The mountain, too, would be gray, if it wasn’t socked in behind the gray fog. A darker gray line delineated the horizon. There is beauty in it if you’re willing to see past the bleakness.

As I sat there looking into the gray water and sky, I thought how this is the way I sometimes see my life. Chronic pain is its monochrome feature. Always there, some days with the heaviness of darker, stormier gray, other times just a little misty gray fog.

Glancing to my left, the late July huckleberry bushes were covered in green huckleberries. More monochrome, only green, making it difficult to distinguish the berries from the leaves. But then I noticed a few of the huckleberries had started to ripen. A lot were green, but some were pink, some were a deep wine, and others were already purple. It won’t be long until they will bring joy to a little girl I know who loves to pick them.

The changing berries gave me renewed hope. Life is not monochrome forever. Even today, I can tell the sun is trying to burn off the fog and gray clouds. A brightness comes and goes bringing hope for a more colorful day ahead. Sometimes it just takes a little time.

My monochrome of chronic pain will have its season. But there will be colorful times interspersed, even during days when the pain is great. There are friendships that bring hot-pink laughter. There are soothing violet pleasures in reading a good book. There are happy, bright yellow squeals from grandchildren. There is the deep blue calm of prayer. The monochrome that tries to take over gets pushed back just a little.

And when the gray lingers, it is a reminder to lean on the one who created the full spectrum of color. He has chosen which colors to use in just the right amount to create his masterpiece. He knows when to blend in other colors and when to just leave the gray. One day, when we look back at the design he has chosen for each of us, we will be amazed at the beauty the grays brought to our lives.

Embrace your monochrome days. They have beauty and purpose and will make the colors around them even more glorious. And just maybe with a little time, they will give way to unexpected vibrant-colored joys.

For I consider the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. Romans 8:17 ESV