hopes & prayers

Today my life idol is having major cancer surgery--at the age of THIRTY SEVEN. I don't know what is in the KC water but this makes the second of my two most favorite STA women (and the 80-millionth that our family knows??) to have breast cancer.

She's been re-reading some of her travel journals and on her blog she shared this, which she wrote while living in Central America fourteen years ago:

To me, we are alive to learn as much as we can in the time we have. We are to learn about ourselves, others, and the world we live in. We are here to have and to accomplish dreams, we are here to fail, to love, to hurt, and to be hurt. We are here to desire and to be desired. We are here to accept and to deny. We are here to find balance in ourselves and in what we do. We are here to live, I mean really live. To take chances and to not be afraid of what those chances may bring. If we don't we will never learn. And education is what makes us be and what makes us wise. Never stop learning because learning equals life.

Somewhere, there must be a lesson in all of this, but I wish there was another way to learn it.