Remembering.

For many families, the month of May is a double whammy, isn't it? For families where someone is missing, the first heartache is Mother's Day; the second arrives as Memorial Day. And I'm guessing that for the families of missing someones everyday is Memorial Day.

In the last week or so, I have flipped through several women's magazines looking for Kyrie. I search the faces on hundreds of pages looking for what she would have grown into. Sometimes I find a nose or chin or my guess at what her eyes would have looked like 20 years from now. Sometimes when I'm falling asleep, I try to imagine things that she would have said or what she would have wanted to do as a profession, what her first boyfriend would have been like or how tall she would have grown. (Very tall, I'm guessing. She had such long legs & long feet for a little one-year-old.) I think about Kyrie asking her first real question about the way the world works or what kind of older sibling she would have been or what kind of mother to her children.

All of these wonderings lead me to what Kyrie has come to represent for me, perhaps for you, too, and what she will represent to others through you and the foundation. Potential. She represents our potential to something good with today because she and a million other children today cannot. The spinning world and its trivialities can subtly distract us from the marrow that our purposes owe to Him today, often times in ways that seem perfectly harmless: celebrity gossip, community gossip, redundancy, assumption, pettiness, doubt, self-produced anxiety, etc. Henry David Thoreau wrote, "Our life is frittered away by detail ... Simplify, simplify." Just little choices in little situations that erode goodness and joy, eh?

Today, I'll simplify. Today, I'll remember. I'll remember Kyrie's valiancy; I'll remember all the soldiers who have lost their lives to give me my freedom, I'll remember my grandparents' worthwhile labor & sacrifices; I'll remember my ancestors who left their homes to give me mine; I'll remember St. Paul in his prison cell; I'll remember Christ on the cross. And I'll remember to take today with me tomorrow.