Death

Still trying to make the giving link work. It's below; if it's still not clickable, please take the extra second to paste it into your browser and give.


http://www.kintera.org/faf/r.asp?t=4&i=266140&u=266140-252262280&e=2334045622

Almost twenty years ago, for the first time, I watched someone die. She had been a friend of my mom's for years. They met through some connection around pets, and our relationship started off on rocky ground. (I remember an incident that involved her smoking in our living room and me spraying Lysol around her head.) Paula and I had come a long way, though. She was a single mom, and my first year in high school, I spent a bunch of afternoons at her house, baby-sitting her only daughter. Now she was remarried, battling cancer in its second or third wave through her tired flesh, and on Good Friday, she was dying. I was by her bedside with her husband and my mom and watched spellbound as her lungs heaved and she struggled against death, failing as we all will in the end.

I think of death every year on this day, because of Paula, but also because I follow a tortured, slain, incarnate God. Those of us who are captivated by him associate death with judgment and pain and senseless futility as well all do, I suppose. But we also sometimes, especially on this day, see sacrifice and hope in it all.

In the suffering of young children, trafficked into a brutal sex industry, I look for life and I see Love 146 rescuing girls out of the jaws of death, helping their lungs which heave with fear breathe life again, helping their faces frozen in despair find hope. I want to help. Join me, please.

Ran 6 miles today
Benched 4,000 lbs.

Ran - 14.5 miles
Biked - 34 miles
Benched - 18,895 pounds
Raised - $315

I need to raise much more, I feel.