This week our Columbine community gathered to remember the massacre twenty years ago at our local high school where two students killed thirteen and injured twenty-four. I recalled our shock at that time as we wondered, “How can these traumatized students go forward in life?”     
     Take, for instance, Patrick Ireland, “the boy in the window.” He’d been shot twice in the head and once in the foot and lay bleeding to death for nearly three hours. With one side paralyzed, he crawled across the floor and hoisted himself to a broken window. He dangled precariously from the second floor until officers grabbed his falling body and rushed him to surgery. Doctors removed the bullet in his forehead, but couldn’t touch one deep in his brain that he still carries today.     
     The prognosis? Patrick might never walk or talk again.     
     But at our memorial service, “the boy in the window” rose to speak. Through seven months of therapy, Patrick had learned to read, write, walk, and talk. He graduated from Columbine as valedictorian, then graduated from college magna cum laude with a 3.9 GPA.     
     Patrick says a major factor in his recovery was choosing “to be a victor instead of a victim.” Also, he learned “there’s tremendous power in forgiveness, while unforgiveness is a silent killer. Forgiveness is hard, painful, a process,” he says, and the key is “to stop focusing on what others have done to us and to focus on what Jesus has done for us.”     
​     I left the community gathering pondering that no matter what trials any of us face, Patrick’s attitude can propel us forward. We can determine to be victors and to forgive.

     When I met Gloria Steinem years ago, she was the well-known leader of the radical feminist movement and I was far from radical - just an unknown reporter assigned to cover a speech of hers. I agreed with her that women ought to receive equal opportunity and pay (I could barely make my rent and buy food). But beyond that, our beliefs diverged. She didn’t want to marry; I did. She sought to elevate women through careers; I gave up my career to raise three daughters.     
     Now I discover that with all our differences, our beliefs have converged in one way. Steinem says that through the decades, she had two tracks running in her head. One was “thinking forward to some future scene, imagining what should be.…” The second track was recalling “what I actually did or should have done in the immediate past.” Those two tracks squeezed out the present, Steinem writes in “Audacious Aging.”     
     But now she’s learning to be “alive-in-the-moment.” So am I. When asked, “What are you looking forward to?" (which implies that my current situation isn’t enough), I let my thoughts sift through the here-and-now. After all, today is “the only time in which we can be fully alive,” Steinem says.     
     I agree. As I relish the present, I discover I’m more grateful for the past and less concerned about the future.     
     And that is a radical practice to embrace.

    Ever find it hard to see anything beautiful during a dark time? I’ve struggled with that since the sudden, unexplained death of our six-year-old granddaughter this year - nothing but pain and sadness. So I’ve held onto a story I learned about Robert, a father scrambling to provide for his family early in the Twentieth Century. He’d attempted various jobs that produced nothing but poverty. At Christmas he tried earning money at a fair to buy presents, but failed. On his way home to his farmhouse late that night, he stopped his horse by the woods. With miles to go before he slept, he could freeze under a blanket of snow on this darkest night of the year.     
     Seventeen years later. Robert Frost stepped outside his stone farmhouse into a radiant sunrise in the lightest time of the year. His mind traveled back to that bleak night. But now, Frost recalled the brush of easy wind and downy flake - beauty!     
     He hurried inside to his dining room table, and in twenty minutes penned “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” It’s perhaps the most famous poem of the Twentieth Century, calling us to search for loveliness in our darkness.     
     We all face bitter-cold journeys in life. I’m thinking that, as Frost discovered, I won’t find beauty in my circumstances, but instead in my setting. It’s in the hug of a friend. Or a meal dropped off to sustain us. Or the quiet look from someone who understands. That’s beauty in darkness.     
​     Frost’s poem is here.

     Trust me, like lilies bursting through murky waters to bloom in the sunshine, strength can blossom out of weakness.     
     Take, for instance, the life of Claude Monet. After cataracts nearly blinded him and he could no longer discern color, the French impressionist painter created some of his best loved works. He yearned to capture his waterlily ponds on canvas, but they appeared gray to him. Therefore, Monet relied on the labels on his paint tubes to know which to spread onto his palette. Through his perseverance, the artist’s shimmering pond paintings reflect not only the sky, they reflect a man who believed vivid beauty existed even when he could no longer see it.     
     Like Monet, I’ve been plagued with vision problems - near and far sightedness that forced me into lenses as thick as Coke bottles, astigmatism that distorted images, cataracts that threatened to turn everything dark. Surgeries improved my sight, but left it changing throughout the day - something not always easy to live with.     
     Yet my delight in nature grew out of this weakness. I remember when I put on my first pair of glasses and peered at tree bark. Shocking - how intricate! Years later, I still love photographing the world’s complexity, something I appreciate because it was once only a blur.      
     So what’s your weakness? Has it developed a strength in you? Don’t let that weakness overcome you. Search for the backbone of character and strength it develops in you.    
​     Because nothing in this life has to be wasted. Not even handicaps.

     First Tony’s parents divorced, then his mother underwent shock therapy. He begged his mom to set aside part of her alimony money for food, but she burned it up in cigarettes.
     Our friend Tony decided that if he was going to make it, “I had to make it on my own.” So he left home at thirteen and moved in with older guys. That dropped him into a culture of pot and alcohol.
     Yet he persisted in school, attending classes during the day and working at a Chinese restaurant at night (“I was the only white guy there.”). He graduated, married, had three kids, attended college, and joined the energy industry. Fast forward: Tony’s wife left, and he finished raising their youngest child. He remarried, welcoming his new wife’s family. Meanwhile, his expanding career moved him around fifteen countries on five continents.
    Then the bottom fell out, and Tony learned he couldn’t make it on his own. Work-related social drinking had drowned him. His greatest accomplishment occurred then when he “turned it all over to The Man, Jesus Christ,” he says. “There’s got to be a word above gratefulness to describe what I feel.”
     So how did Tony survive the odds stacked against him? As he told us about his life, I observed he never blamed others. He took responsibility. And he realized he couldn’t make it on his own.
​     That’s a wise man.

    Tony joked it was okay to tell his story
“as long as it includes that I love my God,
​rock and roll, and all people.”