holy war

On Saturday, Curt and I spent our 6th year at Joe’s Big Race as volunteers, planners, or racers. On Saturday, a friend was racing with his father… and his father collapsed suddenly and passed away.  On Saturday, a man exactly my father’s age, in better shape than my father, left without warning.  The family is fighting.

My best friend’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She waged war and won, and has the scars to prove it.  She is fighting.

My friends have lost two babies in 2 years.  They are fighting.

My daughter cannot speak.  She cannot run straight, and many days fights to simply keep her undies on her little bird buns.  She is fighting.

Our friends, our dear sweet friends, are dealing with early onset Alzheimer’s.  Earlier this month, the husband placed his wife in a nursing home.  She is battling the horrible stage where her brain knows something isn’t right but cannot make sense of it, leaving her in a constant state of anxiousness.  He, newly retired, now lives at home alone.  He is fighting.

I am shaken.  I do not like this world.  It has its moments of beauty… its promises of New Life, its whispers of Better Things to Come, but I am not in love with this world.  It is too excruciating to be welcoming, too fickle to be a friend, too broken to be home.

There is nothing ‘good’ about tomorrow. Good Friday. It remembers a day when the sky went dark, when friends betrayed friends, when a mother watched her son march through the streets a prisoner, when the weight of the world was cast on one man, and when a father watched a nation turn on his son. Friday? Friday is awful.

I am an Easter person in a Good Friday world. (-Barbara Johnson)

I am waiting for Sunday.

Sunday, I will sing and pray and give thanks.  And, I will think of you… and you… and you… all you who are tired of fighting alone.  I will walk with you!  I will carry some of your Friday, and you will carry some of mine.  And we will make it to Sunday… whenever that glorious Sunday comes… we will make it there together.

Keep fighting!  It is a holy war. And while the battle is often bleak, I can PROMISE you the ending is worth it.