The Colors of our Lives

     August 24, 1992

      It was a singular day for this nation. Oh, perhaps not on the order of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon or the Assassination of President Kennedy, but Hurricane Andrew was the costliest disaster to ever be visited on this nation. Insurance costs have been estimated as high as $40,000,000,000. That’s forty billion dollars!

      Florida is a large state. It stretches a full 500 miles from the western panhandle to the last island in “the string of pearls”; Key West. I lived in Central Florida, and had little to fear from this storm, since it was forecast to remain well south of our area.                                                                                        

     It was Sunday, August 23^rd and I found myself addressing a small group of believers. “We need to pray for those folks in South Florida. They’re in for a real beating tonight and tomorrow”. I couldn’t know it at that moment, but I was destined to be “one of those folks” in less than 48 hours.

    Cities like Homestead and Florida City prepared for the worst. Andrew was a storm that “would not be denied”. Its Category 5 winds, gusting as high as 180 miles per hour, crashed into the Atlantic Coast of Florida in the wee hours of August 24^th, and swiftly drove it’s way, east to west, across the peninsula.

      Thousands of people joined a mass exodus to local shelters and to other parts of the state. More than a few people decided to ride out the storm in “the security of their own homes”. Hundreds, possibly thousands, both remembered and regretted their decision to do so.

     Mobile homes were twisted into indescribable shapes. Public and private buildings, of every kind, were broken into gray rubble. $300,000 homes were little more than trash plywood and cinder blocks. Sailboats were left high and dry, and military aircraft, at Homestead Air Force Base, were turned on their sides. One old museum aircraft flew its last mission that day, unoccupied and without a pilot, and landed a mile away without any damage!                                                                                                                       

     Every tree and every bush, for twenty miles square, were totally stripped of their leaves. The landscape looked, for all the world, like Maine in winter. The human cost was relatively low in terms of fatalities. About thirty people lost their lives. The human cost was extreme in terms of lingering trauma. “Andrew” would always be more than a boy’s name to them.

     The phone rang and my wife answered it. “Hi, this is Sergeant Richie from the 2^nd of the 116^th Field Artillery in Lakeland. Your husband, Bill, is being called to active duty, and should report for duty as soon as possible”.

Needless to say she was, and I was, subsequently, surprised.

      The convoy began its two hundred mile journey the morning of the 25^th and 35,000 federal and state troops converged on Miami and its environs. Our battalion “set up shop” at the Metro Zoo, and it was, indeed, a zoo. Though I never saw them myself, I understand that a “Noah’s Ark” of animals had been dispersed across the countryside. We were instructed to shoot any monkeys we encountered, since dozens of experimental, AIDS-infected primates had escaped from a nearby research area.

    I lived in a tent for forty days (speaking of Noah). We didn’t have shower facilities for over a week. Rain water flowed across our dirt floor, and mosquitoes feasted on every blood type known to man. The days were long and the nights were short, and one day blurred into the next, and weeks went by.

     I wouldn’t take a million dollars for the experience and I wouldn’t give a nickel to do it again. Several of us were leaving a local Mc Donald’s restaurant one day. We wore camouflage fatigues, and M-16 rifles hung loosely over our shoulders. Suddenly a woman appeared in front of me, and just as suddenly, hugged me. I have never forgotten the experience or her words, “You guys will never know how much we appreciate you here”. Well, readers, her warm embrace and her heartfelt words more than made up for all the heat, inconvenience and trouble of those forty days.

    There’s a psychological principle called Sensory Deprivation. Scientists could have easily invented the term to characterize South Florida after Hurricane Andrew. Browns, Grays and Blacks permeated the landscape. The color GREEN was strangely missing. All  color was missing.  Palm trees had been thoroughly stripped of their fronds. Bushes had been denuded of every leaf. Solid block buildings were broken down and only gray rubble remained. As time progressed, the sky was filled with thick, black smoke; the result of dozens of temporary burn sites. Hundreds of dump trucks ferried thousands of tons of trash to these dreary places.

    Color is something you take for granted. Researchers tell us that most animals see in black and white. I’m glad God gave us the ability to experience color. Well, my color vision was virtually absent for those forty days. Every soldier and every citizen had been rudely deprived of color. While I realized the absence of color, the accumulative result was not immediately obvious. Hours wore into Days and Days wore into Weeks and Gray was the Order of the Day.

     October 3^, 1992 dawned, and we prepared to go home. Our forty days of Sensory Deprivation were ended. We were leaving The Land of Major Gray and minor green. For something was occurring now that is not characteristic of Florida. The trees and bushes were budding again. Everywhere, tiny green buds were appearing on bare twigs and branches, so characteristic of the Northern United States.

     Ah. COLOR. For our eyes literally feasted on COLOR as we crossed a certain invisible line twenty miles from Homestead. But my mind was numb and dull and cloudy, and that dullness and fatigue accompanied me to my home in Central Florida, and remained with me for a month. My mind had been sensitized to the Grays and Browns and Blacks, and the switch to COLOR would be both startling, progressive and slow.

     We were meant to see in COLOR. We were meant to experience COLOR. We have been immeasurably blessed with a world of COLOR. But, so like this experience, our spiritual health and maturity depends on the existence of COLOR.    

    The Bible tells us that “Without a vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18). This is a book about such dreams. Dreams give life COLOR. They are among the most precious of qualities because they are God-generated and God-given.

     But we find ourselves content to live lives of sensory deprivation; ordinary, mundane, unfulfilling little lives, flitting away the eternal in favor of the temporal.

     My family and I visited Mammoth Cave, in Kentucky, when I was a child. I’ll never forget the experience. The cavern was, indeed, Mammoth. It was literally “humongous”! At one point, during the visit, the tour guide turned off the lights. BLACKNESS! Pure LONELINESS! DARKNESS that hung like a cloak! Never in my life have I virtually breathed the ABSENCE OF LIGHT! Talk about Sensory Deprivation!

We were never meant to live such a life.

 

By William McDonald, PhD. Excerpt from "A Dream Book"

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