Women from Past... and the Present

Nothing like a world disaster to make our own small trials pale. Today my prayers and thoughts are with the people in Japan as they sort things out and attempt to recover their lives and property.

Anne Christensen Whitney 1980

Interesting to think that only a generation ago my parents were fighting the Japanese people, believing that Japan was looking for world dominance over the United States.  My mother was named Anna, but her family and friends called her Anne (with an "e," like Anne of Green Gables she said). Mom was in college during most of World War II. She sang tenor in the school choir because theren't were enough men in college at the time to fill all the men's parts.  During her senior year in high school she was a regular volunteer at the Army Air Base near Las Vegas, acting as one of the "hostesses" at the canteen. She wrote to several fellows she knew who were in the war, including her two older brothers, one in the Army and one in the Navy. She told me that she later wished she had been more supportive of her mother in those days. Grandma Hazel was a strong woman in many ways, but having two sons overseas was seriously taxing to her emotional and physical health.

After the war, Mom married an Army Air Corps veteran and they used the GI bill for him to get a college education. She never did finish her degree in drama, but she encountered plenty of drama in her chosen profession of being a mother--of 10 children. Dad became a schoolteacher so we never had a lot of money, but my mother knew how to make her house a home. And she did so.

I am asking God to bless the people in Japan that wherever they are sleeping tonight, they will have some sense of home in their hearts and that those hearts will receive comfort. It isn't just the mortar and bricks that make up our homes. It is the love and comfort that comes from a higher source than that which can be shaken  apart or washed away. May those people who have lost so much feel our love coming across the Pacific Ocean to them now.