Despair, Hope

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Someone said to my teacher, “I want to kill myself in despair over the suffering.” And I thought…

Dan, I want to lift you up in rejoicing over suffering ended, diminished, and accompanied in your ~60 years of mercy and my ~40 years of trying and if both of us fall over dead today, we know that younger people are moving up to the line and we’ll get past a 100 years of mercy one way or another. A 100 years, a 1,000 years, we’ll hold the line.

I was talking last week with someone who works emergency about working in emergency and how it’s possible to take (literally) just a moment or not even that, just in the way you be, to be nice; to bring some confidence and comfort to people at the edge of existence – and people going beyond that. You don't have to go anywhere to be a missionary. I was thinking about 10 or 12 years ago when I was in a room with a man in his 70s and his wife, also in her 70s who was dying and I noticed her breast was exposed in all the action and I reached over and covered her and her husband said, “It’s okay.”

My beloved wife