Memories

Time moves. It slides, skips, blasts on. It runs, it walks, it sulks. It slowly climbs up the slide ladder at night and swooshes down the slide in the day.

And you wake up 4 years later.

I have tons of memories of my father. Many are simple snapshots. Like a slideshow. Walking down the street at night. Standing by a horse pasture when I was teeny that he used to take me to all the time. Coaching the flag football team i was on when i was 5. Playing basketball with him in the backyard. Him sitting at the sound board, a huge smile on his face. Or a grimmace of intent as he ever-dialed in the frequencies and mix.

And I smile. The many blessings of having these great and small moments.

And i also see him, a virtual skeleton, sunken and unimaginably fraile sitting in the chair. Or lying in the hospital. Or being wheeled into an ambulance. Or doubled over in pain coming home from the radiologist.

As much Id love to have those memories vanish. They wont. And are sometimes more prevailant, more immediate.

But hard as they are, I cant say that I would really want to lose those images.

Those images, those moments have fueled a fire in me I'd never had previously. They remind me the finite strings of life are thin and can snap at any given second.

Which all really reminds me to live. Its a process, but these memories wont let me stop or turnback.

Thankfully.

I see him sitting in the chemo chair, trying to whet his lips, trying to find some comfort. and I see all the other people sitting in that chemo room. Young, old, and all with that same fear, that same sunken skin. And I watch the nurses feed and encourage foods that only fuel their diseases. While they are being eaten alive from the inside. And I lost faith in medicine. Western medicine at least. In doctors. In hopsitals. In people who are supposed to know what wrong and how to fix us. People who very blatently dont.

But I dont greive this fallen faith.

For I've found faith in something more important.

The truth.

Our diets. And you know what, we can suddenly save ourselves. Without PhDs and millions of dollars of hospital bills. Suddenly God says in a tested but reasuring voice, "You've always had to power to change, to heal, to love. Go with it. Ive given everyone all the tools they need."

And i see the light in my father's eyes dimming.

And there was nothing I could do.

But I can do something now. I can fight so that others dont have to go through that. I can fight the pessimisim that readily flows in these streets. I can shine. Little light that it is, it can help one person. Even inadvertantly.

I can constantly try to enlighten myself to be fully awake when around friends, to not divide my time with them by distractions of cell phones, to listen, to simply bask in the blessing of the moment. It's not easy. Our minds are taught to wander as children. I wonder, though, if I would never see one of my friends again, would I feel that i have let them know how much they meant to me?

I got to tell my dad. He knew.

As for everyone else, Im working on it.

This is the Love Initiative.