Valerie is a 42-year-old, single, Reformed Christian lady who lives in Baltimore. She doesn't remember a time
before she knew and loved Jesus, but she does remember accepting John Calvin into her heart in March of 2000.
Valerie is a member of Christ Reformed Evangelical Church in Annapolis.
Though her career aspiration is to be a housewife, Valerie has not yet found anyone suitable who wishes to hire
her for employment in that field (or, more properly, anyone suitable has not found her), so in the meantime she
earns her daily bread working in communications -- editing, writing, print design and website management.
Churchill's Metaphor Doesn't Work for Me
It's not a black dog. Black means darkness, sleep, comfort. And while I'm not much of a dog person, a Lab or a Newfie (what "black dog" brings to my mind's eye) is a warm and comforting concept. No, it's soul-sucking, sensory deprivation gray. And it's not animate. It's more like cement or Soviet architecture or a sea of cubicle walls. It's a 45 played at 33 -- sluggish and surreal. It's a strange combination of deadness and deep feeling. It's weariness, weariness, weariness.
Hope in God; For I shall yet praise Him, The help of my countenance and my God.
On October 15, 2008 10:58 AMAngiewrote... I had to google Churchill and "black dog" to figure out what in the world you were talking about!
Consider another view in praise of grey...from "The Glory of Grey" by Chesterton (from Alarms and Discursions):
"...Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch. A bright blue sky is necessarily the high light of the picture; and its brightness kills all the bright blue flowers. But on a grey day the larkspur looks like fallen heaven; the red daisies are really the red lost eyes of day; and the sunflower is the vice-regent of the sun.
"Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless; that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of existence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation and promise. Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour; of brightening into blue or blanching into white or bursting into green and gold. So we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is grey weather in our hills or grey hairs in our heads, perhaps they may still remind us of the morning."
