Today is a sad day.

In the past 24 hours, tragedy has been happening all over the place. First there was the death of Farrah Fawcett, then Michael Jackson. While the nation has been reeling from all of that, Northwest Indiana has been hit with two incredibly tragic deaths too: the gruesome murder of a two-year-old girl and the death of an entire family of five in a car accident. One of my friends is giving a eulogy at her grandmother’s funeral as I write this. Another friend just announced that his father (whose girlfriend died in an accident a week ago) overdosed on pills. Unfortunately, I’m sure there are hundreds of other similar stories to tell…

Times like this can be so overwhelming. Times like this make me ask a lot of questions: What did they do to deserve that? How can some people be so evil? WHEN IS THE BAD NEWS GOING TO END?

I can’t answer any of those questions. No one can. But there are some things I CAN do…

I can hug my beautiful, healthy daughter a little more tightly today.
I can call my mother and tell her I love her.
I can hold my friend’s hand when she cries.
I can pray for those who are hurting right now, as well as for those who have done wrong.
I can be grateful for the life I’ve been given, no matter how mundane it may seem sometimes.

Sometimes I think we need to experience death and tragedy so that we can be reminded of just how good we’ve got it. I may not have a lot of money, and I may be stressed about the busyness of life, but those “problems” seem like such petty things to worry about in the context of what’s happened in the past 24 hours.

Let’s take this opportunity to step away from our own individual pity parties, and start truly, humbly appreciating life again.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 3:43 pm and is filed under parent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.