Light shines through the windows, I stare.
Asked to design a grand spectacle to celebrate a
battle from
50 years before.
I live on the island of Kwajalein in the Marshall
Islands,
where a
decisive battle was fought in 1944.
The committee meets and the Island Memorial Chapel
is to
be the place,
it’s southern facing wall will let light stream in.
A gesture expressing where the building’s suds are
found and
a vision
springs forth in my mind!
18 feet tall with a 5 foot wide circle a third of
the way from top.
I see the flags of two nations on either side.
Tropical flowers abound and a soldier is kneeling at
the grave of
a fallen
comrade, whose dog tags he holds.
He is looking up, not down, towards the setting sun
of an
enemy’s
influence, in hope, not despair.
War symbols, images of ship and fighter plane are
present
but small;
in positions appropriate for 50 years later,
to
commemorate all who died and fought for freedom.
On the very coral beach where I stood, a speck of an
atoll in the
Pacific Ocean,
just above the equator, West of the International
Dateline in
tomorrow. How fitting!
I’m still remembering 32 years later that the role I
played as an
artist designer,
was planned from my first love of colored glass
in a Sunday school classroom as a child; then helping John Heiss a stained-glass
window crafssman in Claremont struggling in a start-up business, where I learned what
shapes could or couldn't be cut from glass sheets, to when God placed me
in the right
place at the right time, with the right skills to do His will.
