Sad news

Will, whom I wrote about earlier here, lived for just a few short months and he never ventured beyond his bed in the neonatal intensive care unit. Born at just 24 weeks, he faced enormous obstacles just to try to get to his original due date, which was supposed to be in mid-February. Early Saturday morning Will passed away.

Through it all his parents, my friends Mary and John, remained at his side, watching as their firstborn struggled to breathe and squirmed against the constraint and pain of of the wires and tubes snaking in and around his body. They only got to hold him a couple of times, and in the few photos I've seen the look on their faces as they cradled his tiny head against their chests is pure joy. They read him books, including Goodnight Moon, Two Little Trains, and Jamberry, played him lullaby CDs, got to know him the way only parents can know their children.

As a way to keep friends and family abreast of Will's condition, John started a blog, which can be found at www.willkenyon.blogspot.com/. As I've said before, John is a gifted writer, and before long many people were following Will's journey, including many strangers who stumbled upon the site by accident or heard about it through the Internet grapevine. Thanks to John's blog, many of us got to know Will in a way we would not have otherwise, sharing John and Mary's joys every time Will seemed to be turning a corner, their fears as he struggled to rid his body of excess fluid and to fight infection, and their great loss, which now is our loss, too.

Amazing, isn't it, how much of an impact even the smallest, most vulnerable among us can have on the world? There's a great lesson to be learned there.

For those of you who are the praying sort, I hope you'll offer up some prayers for John and Mary. They need to know how loved they are, and how loved Will was and is, and after their hearts are wrung out and their throats raw from crying and the condolence cards have stopped showing up in the mail and people have stopped shaking their heads sadly when they pass by and giving them wide berth -- when John and Mary enter that long, lonely silence that follows all tragedies, that place where they have to go alone -- they need to know that they are still not alone, that God is with them yet, holding them the way they got to hold Will those too-few times in the hospital. They will need to know that peace. Pray for that, will you?

As far as my own blog? Well, I haven't updated it in a while, partly because I've been really busy and partly because my heart just hasn't been in it. I hope to put some new things up there soon. But they may take this blog in a slightly different direction. I've been doing a lot of thinking about my faith, about Christian spirituality, about prayer, and maybe I'll share some of those thoughts with y'all, if for no other reason than to keep me honest. The truth is, I'd considered launching a different blog, an anonymous "God talk" blog that even my friends didn't know about because I was afraid what they might think about me. "Oh man," they'd say, "looks like Steve's gone off and got that old time religion. Hide the booze."

But maybe I'll take that chance anyway, because this is really important to me. And in the end, whether people want to admit it or not, I think that is what's really important to everyone -- figuring out why they were put here on earth and what they're going to do about it.