The Vegas shootings hit me pretty hard.
I’m typically pretty careful about not watching the news because I don’t and can’t comprehend why people do what they do.
I don’t understand why someone who was going to take his own life thought he should kill 59 complete strangers first. Mothers, fathers, sons and daughters all gone from this world at the hands of a complete stranger.
I’m a Jason Aldean fan… I could have been there.
I could have had my kids with me and it’s too much to bear the thought of.
Yesterday morning my heart felt broken completely open.
I watched Jimmy Kimmel and his extremely emotional talk about the Vegas shootings.
My heart was bleeding for all of us. We are all affected when our world goes crazy.
It was all I could think about on my drive to work.
As I was sitting in my office I had an unexpected visitor .
My visitor has an adult son who has Lyme and for the past couple of years they hadn’t been making headway with the treatments, and they were starting to feel defeated, it had been a painfully long expensive road with no positive results.
Lyme disease is starting to affect Canadians, and I’ve known a handful of people who weren’t diagnosed in time.
The longer it’s in your body, the harder it is to treat with success.
It’s awful. It’s painful and it’s debilitating.
But yesterday when he popped in my office he had some good news.
His son had seen a video online of a woman who had made an almost full recovery from Lyme. He looked her up, phoned her and talked about her treatment.
Her husband and her invited him to their place in B.C. to meet their doctor and begin treatment with him.
They have completely taken him under their wing and are going to help him get back to health by offering their support and by footing the bill for all of his treatments (many of the treatments are not covered by Canadian healthcare, so it’s financially draining).
They are Christian people and felt called to help him on his journey to wellness.
Isn’t it amazing when we find angels in real life?
Yesterday morning, in the wake of all of the tragedy in the news, I felt so grateful to hear a story about a hero and it helped to restore my faith in humanity.
He was my own angel delivering me the news I need to hear.
Marianne Williamson said, “people who hate often do so with great conviction, what we need are people who love with conviction”.
Not only do we need to love with more conviction, we need to spread the stories of love and inspire more people to love others.
There are more good people than bad people, but we need to show up for each other, even the people we don’t know.
Every action, every story, every glimmer of hope, no matter how small, can make a difference to someone.
We may not be able to stop the hate and the hate crimes today, but we can love one another, and tell stories of hope and hero’s and do it relentlessly.
And I hear them saying you’ll never change things
And no matter what you do it’s still the same thing
But it’s not the world that I am changing
I do this so this world will know
That it will not change me
– The Change, Garth Brooks