A Celebration Of Life

Hi everyone. Hope you've had a good week.

All week long, I've been consumed with sadness. Undoubtedly, you're aware of the horrible Pennsylvania Amish school shootings this week. Even though hundreds of miles separate my family and I from that place, I've just ached all week. I am the parent of a small child, and not a day goes by when I don't pray for her safety and fear for it in turn. Our schools have lock-down plans and practice drills for how to respond in this very sort of thing. But the Amish are the purest of people. Kind. Open. Trusting. That something like this could happen to them...to their children...is the sickest kind of heartbreak. The grace and the dignity that the surviving community has shown in these past few days has taught me an invaluable lesson about forgiveness and grace. Their beauty and their unselfish love is just overpowering to me. As those of you who read my blog regularly know, I'm not very good at forgiveness. I am not Amish, I am not part of that community, and I do not know the young victims or their families. So from afar, I look for a way to help...to try and make things less awful. Maybe the best thing I can do, in addition to praying for the surviving relatives and community, is to celebrate the lives of those lost beautiful children by becoming more forgiving myself. What better way to honor lives led in kindness and selflessness than to live kindly and selflessly?

This morning, we learned as well that Buck O'Neil died overnight. I've not lived in Kansas City for very long, but I've come to love Buck as one of my own in these last few years. Every appearance, every charity event, every time his presence could do good, he was there. Always smiling, always encouraging, always happy. What a beautiful man, and what a loss for the Kansas City community. Rest well, dear friend. Thank you for the joy.

Today, I'm also celebrating two living souls as well. We're having a party tomorrow to celebrate Curt's father's birthday, and my beautiful Taylor Hicks turns 30 today. There's really no better way to honor those we lose than to celebrate the lives of those still with us.