“Don’t Stop Until the Whistle Blows”
This week I finished a fundraising event for our school that has taken up much of the last 2 and a half months. In this economy it is tough to fathom how hard it is to ask people to donate their time and money. You ask once and not two or three times like the old days. I am so grateful to all the people who were able to attend and enjoy a wonderful day. It meant so much to hear all the people say how wonderful a time they had know that for a day much of the troubles of the economy were forgotten.
This weekend was a little different than last. As we waited to go out for our first soccer game of the day, we caught a little of the movie “We are Marshall”, on TV. There’s a scene when the coach talks to his team before their first game and telling them about how they can’t replace the team before them that died in a crash the year before, but that if they give it their all and don’t stop until the whistle blows that they’ll all be winners no matter what the score. As I watched the movie I saw my children listening. They hardly ever listen to dialogue in a movie. We had to leave before the movie ended but our children asked about what happened as we drove to our daughter’s game. Both children played with heart today. It was so fun to see. What a difference a week makes from last week. I don’t know if it was the movie, the weather, or just the time of day, but all seemed much better than last week.
It made me think about where we are with our fight against breast cancer. When will that whistle blow? Maybe never. That is why we have to live and play every day with heart and joy for our opportunity that we have. Don’t sweat the little things and just live life to its fullest. Tomorrow will be the last fill and then we will wait a few weeks for the final surgery. Just in time to be thankful at Thanksgiving.
I guess we’re really at the beginning of our journey. We have many journeys and this one although filled with much heartache and pain to start is just beginning and hopefully will only get smoother. This past week my wife found out that a friend she told to get examined found that she had breast cancer. At first we felt so sad that we had encouraged her to do something that brought bad news, but then she was thanked and realized that she is one of the many cancer survivors who will help to spread the word to others. I saw a T-shirt this weekend from one of the many breast cancer fundraisers and it said it best: “Hope Begins with Us”. It really does.
As an aside, I do have to say that I saw another T-shirt that my mother, a breast cancer survivor of 4 years, sent me. Sometimes we are so close to this disease that we forget we have great examples around us all the time. In the last 10 years my mother has lost her husband of 50 years, both her parents, and had breast cancer yet she is living a full and productive life. She is currently on her third international trip of the year. This time she is in Egypt after visiting Morocco and South Africa earlier in the year.
It made me laugh to know that my mother is on the other side of the world yet thinking of us and sending us crazy stuff on email. It really hit me on so many levels including the funny bone:
