What will you remember?

  • Published
  • By Lt. Col. Brian Thomasson
  • 60th Operations Support Squadron

TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. – I remember my grandfather telling me the same story several times before he died. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps and was stationed in England for most of his service in World War II. But at the end of the war, when the Allies finally were able to gain a foothold in Europe, he was moved forward to help liberate a continent that had been pummeled by war.

My grandfather would recount how his unit arrived at a concentration camp run by the Nazis. With tears in his eyes and fingers shaking, he quietly shared how there were still prisoners in the camps — and there were still bodies stacked in rows — those who had not been fortunate to make it just one more day, but suffered at the hands of their captors and passed away days earlier.

Hearing him speak the words, you could tell it was a moving experience for a young man from a small farm in North Carolina. Then his story would shift, quickly moving towards other, smaller things that surprisingly would eclipse the war stories. He shared stories about my dad and his siblings when they were kids, stories about us as grandkids, about people he knew who had impacted his life, about his faith and how God had taken care of him through the years. The interesting thing was he never recounted personal accolades. He never talked about how he worked his way up from nothing to get a college degree, about running a business he started, or how he bought his first car. All good things, worthy accomplishments, but things that were not the focus at that point.

My grandfather wasn’t a showy person—never given to bravado. He had a tremendous impact on the lives of others, not just in the war, but perhaps more so in the years afterwards, as a school guidance counselor, parent and grandparent. The thing that stood out was that he was always intensely focused on the person in front of him. You always walked away from a conversation with him feeling encouraged. Whether he was thinking about the people in the concentration camp or the little kid struggling in the classroom, his care for people as individuals and desire to serve others made a tremendous impact. He wasn’t perfect, sometimes he got it wrong and had to apologize and trust that those who cared about him would forgive him. But then he focused on what was important and kept going.

When you near the end of your life, what will you look back on in remembrance? What’s going to last? Is it that next promotion? That next job? Personal comfort or the thing that the advertisements told you that you really need? Are the things you’re doing on a daily basis going to contribute to achieving something worthwhile, or are they going to get in the way?

It’s easy in the hustle of life to lose perspective as urgent tasks cause us to be reactive in how we use our time and energy. It’s easy to be personally focused and ambitious -- distracted by thinking that we have to do something amazing or be discouraged thinking our time is wasted if we don’t. This doesn’t mean you only ever do the “important.” Sometimes the mundane is necessary. You can’t just wake up one day and do the big thing, achieve the epic accomplishment, but getting up each day and continuing in the same direction, doing the hard work little by little, can add up to a lot of distance covered in the end. So what’s the answer? Maybe it’s more a matter of perspective and focus.

Those who serve in the military have an advantage in this respect. The nature of the profession means you’re serving something larger than yourself — particularly in a country where we use phrases like, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” The job means you’re serving others and seeking their good, often at personal expense, because people matter.

You may not get it right the first time, or even every time. I know I sure don’t. Sometimes we have to admit we failed, ask for forgiveness from those around us and move forward. But don’t forget to ask yourself, what’s my ‘why?’ What’s really important here? And ‘what’s going to last?’ It probably has something to do with the person in front of you.