Headlines

I loved my dad for countless reasons. The list is long.

Today, I’m loving him for his habit of saving copies of newspapers emblazoned with headlines announcing world-significant events. I still have every edition that he so carefully set aside. The assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King. The death of a pope. The landing on the moon. They all join a pile of a dozen or so moments in his life that were truly life-changing. World changing.

Today I woke up to one of those headlines. A headline that I’ve read over and over as I begin the journey of joining millions and millions of Americans as we process – and remember – what we have experienced as a nation.

I look around my Monday morning world, with a laundry list of things to accomplish, and I find myself wanting to just stop and reflect. I feel grateful for those who fight to give my children and me the privilege of living in the United States. I feel pain for those families who have lost loved ones in our collective fight towards peace. I feel grief knowing that thousands and thousands are no longer here because of the realities of terrorism.

And as much as I despise the reality that one man, one single individual, can be the root of so much evil in the world, the headline in my heart is humbly this-

I AM PROUD