Your Dying Spouse 519 - Play Your Heart Out

In the West, we're all about winning. The successful life, the blessing of prosperity, the miraculous healing.

But life doesn't always work that way.

It didn't work that way for Paul, as he says in 2 Timothy 4-7:

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.


He didn't say he won.

He finished. He was there at the end, still doing his best.

There's another example of this in Stephen Ambrose's book, D-Day:

On the edge of town, Fitzgerald saw a sight “that has never left my memory. It was a picture story of the death of one 82nd Airborne trooper. He had occupied a German foxhole and made it his personal Alamo. In a half circle around the hole lay the bodies of nine German soldiers. The body closest to the hole was only three feet away, a potato masher [grenade] in its fist. The other distorted forms lay where they had fallen, testimony to the ferocity of the fight. His ammunition bandoliers were still on his shoulders, empty of M-1 clips. Cartridge cases littered the ground. His rifle stock was broken in two. He had fought alone and, like many others that night, he had died alone. “I looked at his dog tags. The name read Martin V. Hersh. I wrote the name down in a small prayer book I carried, hoping someday I would meet someone who knew him. I never did.”

Pancreatic cancer is a hopeless fight; add to that non-Hodgkins lymphoma and you've got a double whammy of epic proportions.

But hope does not lie in victory.

Hope lies in taking the next step.

Hope is showing up, just one more time.

We rise from the ashes, and we grab glory.

It's not how you play the game.

It's that you play the game.

Rather than music, here's a clip from We Are Marshall, the wonderful film about a college that had the courage to bring its football team back from the literal dead, after a November 14, 1970 plane crash that killed virtually the whole team and coaching staff (along with family and boosters).

Please pardon my slow response to comments. I do my best, and your comments are really precious to me. Barb is answering many of them now. I'm running on fumes, if you don't mind a macho metaphor.

I'm grateful for the energy to have written this. I'm so glad Barbara's stepped in for many of my posts. I'm really not doing well at all.

Thanks to Carol Ashby, Blessed Are The Pure Of Heart is back on Kindle, and will be available in paperback soon.

Friends are everything. I couldn't have done it.

Marley, the canine waif from Afghanistan, whom WE helped save, has a Facebook page! Please drop by to see how happy he is today.

If you can, please do leave a comment. I am trying to answer all, and I am failing, but please know this - I read and treasure each one.

Below are my recent releases on Kindle -please excuse their presence in the body of the blog. I haven't the energy to get them up as 'buttons' in the sidebar. You can click on the covers to go to the Amazon links.