It Matters

I am not sure many of you think about ‘why’ we writers ‘write’. The truth is… it matters to us. We write about what ‘we’ think is important. No one has to agree, no one has to say yes or no, we just need to express our thoughts in words for the world to see. In some cases, the ‘world’ ends up being your mom and dad… 🙂  That’s okay, but nonetheless it matters.

A young basketball player and more importantly a brave, young woman moved from this world to the next last week, due to the terminal brain cancer she had. Her last ‘work’ on earth wasn’t just being an inspiration to all of us, but it was to raise money to help those who come behind her with the same condition, so that doctors might possibly finding a cure for said disease.

We would all say ‘she matters’. Her life wasn’t wasted and her gift goes beyond words, and more importantly, goes beyond our time here to the eternal. I want to take you to a place few have been with me, but I want to open this up with the hope that it ‘matters’ to you and it ‘makes’ a difference.

There was a time in my life where my priorities got shifted, when things became ‘aligned’. Human nature being the way it is, most if not all of us would admit that we don’t always have a good balance of priorities. It has only happened once where it actually stuck around for weeks. I talk and treat this like it is a person or a living entity but the truth is… it almost felt that way.

It’s been 17 years, 6 months and 26 days and yet, I can still reach and ‘touch’ this time of my life. Her name is Haven and I held her for 8 months and 7 days ‘till she slipped away. Why do I bring this up? I read a quote last week posted by Dr. Catherine Chatmon, with what we think are the last words written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

“How should one become arrogant over successes or shaken by one’s failures when one shares in God’s suffering in the life of this world? You understand what I mean even when I put it so briefly. I am grateful that I have been allowed this insight, and I know that it is only on the path that I have finally taken that I was able to learn this. So I am thinking gratefully and with peace of mind about past as well as present things. …

May God lead us kindly through these times, but above all, may God lead us to himself.

Could we all not have a little more of ‘that’ vs. the dread and panic we all seem to carry about the future?  Could we all find a place where we are ‘held’ in the Divine presence of the One and stop letting the temporal eat away at the eternal?

Haven taught me this.

From the moment she passed from my arms to her Father’s, the tumblers of life ‘realigned’ in a snap! Like a lightning bolt or thunderclap of what really matters… mattered. And what didn’t… slid off my frying pan as if it was a non-stick surface.

I remember, within hours of those events on July 27th, watching a father berate his child in a Golden Corral for dropping food on the floor. I was ready to strangle him. I saw this little girl’s face, the shame, and the embarrassment he was ‘heaping’ on her in front of us all as if ‘he’ was showing how ‘on top’ of things he was. All I saw was he making a complete ass of himself, how ‘image’ was more important than heart, and how easily that could be me

…and you.

For weeks, the bills, future, past, conflicts, worries, fears… they all passed by me. They couldn’t grab or stick to me. I felt like Superman, felt like there was nothing that could touch me because there had been a ‘forced’ reboot if you will, of what really matters.

Love.

I was being ‘held’ by someone, not something but someone who knew that if He didn’t hold me, I would blow apart like a overfilled carnival balloon. POP! I would have been gone. I was walking in a place that I call Narnia. The things I wanted to believe were more real than what was around me. I didn’t want to see death, I didn’t want to see or feel pain, I didn’t want to look at life without her, I didn’t want to look at not being her dad here. I chose a different path that reminds me of a Quote from Robert Fulghum:

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.”

― Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

To you I would say with all of my heart, as if my very life depended on it…

You matter

You matter

You matter

You are not an accident, you are not a happenstance, you are by design and with that being said…

He has you in His hand. You are safe and whatever your future or my future holds, whatever we ‘think’ is ‘bad, hard, difficult’… He’s got you.

What would our world be like if we all ‘knew’ that love is stronger than death? What would happen if YOU, yes I am writing this to you, if YOU understand that no matter what tomorrow holds, you are safe, you are loved and you have a chance to extend that back to everyone you meet… at work, play, church, home everywhere.

There are so many things I ‘love’ in life. Elizabeth, Cayden, Mom and Dad, my family, I love flying, motorcycling, flying, and flying, and flying… did I say FLYING? 🙂 But in the end, these are things that ‘touch’ the other side but are not totally the other side. If I may say, without this getting too intimate, there are times when I ‘feel’ Haven pulling me home. After all of these years I feel that there is a young woman, that is closer to me then I fully understand, waiting for me to finally ‘start’ living.

I have a lot of goals I want to reach soon. Married to my best friend, become a flight instructor, be the best dad ever, etc… but one day, my goal is to stand in front of others again and give this message, give this topic, give these truths to young and old alike. One day to go back into the high schools, go back into the churches and remind them…

YOU MATTER.

Peace on your Journey this week.