The Golden Gate

by Gene Shelburne

With all the 50th anniversaries of World War II events strung out through the past year or two, we’ve been bathed in the nostalgia and controversies of that bygone era. Let me add one more tale to the lot.

Like so many G.I.’s in 1942, my good friend Jack Bickly married himself a winsome lass only months before Uncle Sam dressed him in khaki and offered him that infamous crash course in soldiering known as Basic Training. Then he was off to battle.

War experiences seldom make good family conversation, but Jack did tell his closest kin about one emotional day that he said he would never forget.

After Uncle Sam taught Jack to fight, he loaded him along with a thousand other young soldiers onto the biggest boat this West Texas farm boy had ever laid eyes on. With a lump in his throat he stood on the deck of the troop transport and watched that morning as they sailed out of San Francisco Bay into the endless expanse of Pacific waters.

Bound for skirmishes in the jungles of New Guinea, Jack and his comrades grew silent as they passed beneath the fabled arches of the Golden Gate bridge. “It was a gateway to experiences we couldn’t begin to imagine,” he explained almost 50 years later, “and each of us stood there wondering if he would survive to see that famous bridge again.”

Several times in life most of us will pass through a Golden Gate of sorts:

• That summer day when we pack everything we own into a beat-up Chevrolet and drive away from our parents’ door, on our own for the first time.

• That night in candlelight when by saying “I do” we bid adieu to the independence of single life and embrace the unfamiliar duties of pleasing a mate.

• That day when, still wet with the water of baptism, we turn our back on old habits and take our first tentative steps into Christian discipleship.

When you go where you’ve never gone before, it’s always exciting and scary. A bit of both, but somehow scary tends to win out, doesn’t it?

On those Golden Gate days when for the moment we have to “walk by faith and not by sight,” two things happen. First of all, we discover our own true mettle. And, more important, we learn that God’s strength and grace go with us through the gate.