Overcoming Adversity Bloghop For Andrew

Nick over at Scattergun Scribblings is hosting the "Overcoming Adversity" bloghop. He is trying to raise funds to send his step-son to a specialist college in Scotland. Andrew has cerebral palsy and Nick is going to compile all the posts from this bloghop and publish them. Using all funds raised to help Andrew. I will be in line to buy that book. Join and share if you can. Good luck to Nick and Andrew!

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes Life Is Adversity

 

My post may pale compared to others I have read yesterday and today but I see the adversity of the most insidious kind most days. It is not the one traumatic event that is a spike of adversity but rather the crushing never seeming to end kind of adversity. It is proof there is adversity all around us that many times we grow numb to.

 

The girl at  work with 4 kids, all by different fathers, now raising them as a single mother. The youngest almost losing a leg when hit by a bus while riding his bike in Mexico. The one by one untimely deaths of most of her family members, mother, father, aunt, just last week an uncle. The never ending merry go round of sick kids and invariably sick herself. Her everyday paranoia that her blood pressure medicine in making her condition worse. Her sister with serious and often hospital required heart issues. I don't even know when she truly has last had a happy day. She has fortitude that I am not sure I could muster. Her life is a constant adversity curveball.

 

A friend of mine and his wife are agonizing at the decline of her father due to emphysema after years of smoking and second-hand smoke. They have been handling this inevitably fatal condition for a few years now and  it has gotten progressively worse recently. I know the man as he worked for me for a short while many years ago. The last picture I saw of him with an oxygen tube and swollen face while his smiling daughter had her arm around him was quite saddening. Hopefully she quit smoking in time to spare herself this misery later on. She has quit.

 

I myself have lost my uncle and mother in consecutive Januarys. Years of 2011 and 2012. Going home for Christmas this year was a little anxious as my Aunt lives in the adjoining condo where my mother lived...and now someone else lives there. I only went to see her once for a short time while I was home. She was astute enough to ask my wife if I had a hard time coming over to see her. I so wanted to make the 2 hour journey south of my sisters to the cemetery but the weather was so bad (blizzard of 2012 stuff) that it would have been crazy to leave town. I even told my sister that this must be Mom's way of telling us to stay here and enjoy each others company and not waste time out in the snow just to visit her grave...because that is exactly the sort of person my mother was.

 

Many of the customer's I deal with in my job have faced adversity so often you would mistake them for the guy in the Lil Abner cartoon who is always followed by that black cloud. Sometimes you can see it and instinctively move away. Afraid that some of it may rub off on you. Lost jobs, burned down houses, deaths in the family, jail. It never seems to end.

 

There is so much adversity everywhere you look. The human spirit somehow mostly always overcomes.

 

Final note...

 

This past Saturday Chris Kyle, the deadliest sniper in American military history and owner of the 1.2 mile kill shot, was himself gunned down at a gun range in rural Glen Rose, TX. About 30 minutes south of my lake house in Granbury, TX. He and another man were shot at close range by another soldier who has been treated for and continued to suffer from PTSD. That is no way to go after 4 tours in Iraq and being shot twice in combat. He leaves behind a wife and children. The irony? He devoted his time to helping in anyway he could when it came to returning service men and PTSD.

 

Nick, take good care of Andrew and God Bless.