THANK YOU AND PLEASE
Yesterday was Veterans Day, and I shared a photo of my Dad on social media. It’s one of my favorite images of him — in army fatigues, in Belgium during the Second World War, collecting a big handful of wildflowers.
I don’t know how much combat Dad saw; he never talked about it. He was right in the thick of the European Arena. This picture was probably taken in late-1944, sometime between D-Day (he landed at Normandy D-Day+2) and the Battle of the Bulge.
He’s so young, about 22 years old. I can hardly imagine what wartime was like for my father, a small-town boy, a gentle and sensitive soul. I know the horrors that he witnessed some months later; he was in the Division that liberated the concentration camp at Buchenwald.
Dad suffered afterwards from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. For 65 years after this, whenever he was startled by a sudden loud noise, his eyes would pop and he’d wail and shake uncontrollably, so hard that he practically vibrated off the ground.
Still, in the middle of that, Dad looked for beauty. For the rest of his life, he looked for beauty. And he found it. He also created it. It inspires me to think that I can, we can, do that, too.
That’s what I love most about this photo.
I haven’t yet worked out what I’m going to talk about on Sunday. I thought I knew, but then I remembered this photo and it sent my heart spinning in a different direction.
- Something about BEAUTY — beauty everywhere, even in appalling circumstances, even there, even here.
- Something about APPRECIATION — what that opens up, for ourselves and for the world and for those we appreciate..
- Something about THANKSGIVING — thanks before please, saying grace first — grounding in that, standing in that, creating from that.
I can’t wait to be with you at 10:00am, November 15, at q-Staff Theatre. With the divine Patty Stephens. XO, Drew
©2026 Drew Groves
