I was going through my Facebook birthdays list Saturday night and handing out my usual Nathan Pyle-inspired greetings. One of my HS friends marked his birthday, and I was stunned to see he’s 58. Holy crap, he’s gotten old, I thought.
Then I froze.
He’s two years younger than I am.
That means I turn 60 in just over five weeks.
In my mind, he and I and our mutual friends are all perpetually in our late 20s or early 30s.
Yet that was all thirty years ago. So much has happened since then. Marriages. Divorces. Second marriages. Kids. Deaths.
Where has the time gone?
Have we all made good use of that time?
Who gets to define “good?”
Sigh.
Diana and I spent Saturday helping Oldest Daughter and Lego Dude (how come I didn’t call him Legolas? What a missed opportunity!) move into their new house. They bought a nice 3/3 in a pretty nice neighborhood. I’m super proud of them for getting to this point in their lives. Too many of their contemporaries, especially in this area, never get to the point of being able to afford a house. Because it’s so expensive to be poor, lots of people never get beyond renting. But they did, and we’re all proud of them.
About Last Week
Remember when I said last week I’d run out of spoons? Here’s one of the things I was contemplating.
What makes Charlie Kirk so special?
They held his memorial in a flipping football stadium, seating over 70,000 people.
Oklahoma is calling for a “Charlie Kirk Memorial Plaza” (with statue!) on every public college campus in the state. No word on who’s going to pay for those. And I’m curious why State Senator Shane Jett didn’t try to require the plazas on private campuses.
What made Charlie Kirk and his death so much different than what happened back in June in Minnesota? You remember that, don’t you? A state representative and her husband were assassinated, a state senator and his wife were shot and wounded, and the attacker carried a target list of 70 names.
Everyone on the list leaned politically left.
They were targeted for their political beliefs.
It seems Kirk’s killer shot him for the same reasons – his political beliefs.
So what makes his murder so different? Why did so many people mourn him and not the murdered people in Minnesota? He was, at the most basic level, just a podcaster and an activist.
What made him so special?
In A World
Early this week, a high school friend posted a photo of Erika Kirk with the caption, “In a world full of Taylor Swifts, Ariana Grandes, and Katie Perrys, let our daughters’ role model be Erika Kirk.”
Aside from anything else, Katie Perry is an Australian fashion designer. Katy Perry is a singer-songwriter (and philanthropist and activist).
I went on to say that I had no problem with any of the women listed (and I included Kirk in that thought). They were all professionally successful, active in furthering causes they believed in, and generous in their philanthropy. What more could I want for my daughters?
My friend said, “Faith.”
I shrugged, saying I was more interested in how they treated people than what supernatural being they believed in.
She said that was offensive to her because she’s a Christian, then eventually deleted my comments.
Whatever. Her wall, her rules. Then again, I didn’t know she was a Christian. I could get snarky about why I didn’t know that, but that’s not my point here.
My point is that Christians are supposed to treat others as they’d want to be treated, and they’re supposed to love their enemies. They’re supposed to treat everyone with kindness, and not judge them harshly, for they’ll be judged to the same standard. It’s that speck and plank thing, among other passages. That meme snarks on some incredibly talented women to try to elevate another woman, who’s really no different from the first three. Charlie Kirk, like it or not, was a divisive person. Why use his widow to sow more division?
Reading
Bronnie Ware is a former Australian palliative care nurse. Back in 2011, she gathered the insights she’d gleaned from her patients into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying – A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing. Three years ago, she talked about them for a piece in Stylist. Read The 5 most common regrets of the dying – and what we can learn from them. Pick up her book from Amazon (affiliate link).
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