I had just finished my workout at the Planet Fitness in Lexington, Kentucky and walked back into the locker room to get my things and head out and face the day. When I walked around the corner, I found Bill Thomas sitting in his wheelchair directly in front of my locker. He was waiting for me. Although we had never met before, there is no doubt in my mind that he was waiting for me. He looked up when I walked over and asked me how I was. I told him I was doing well and asked him the same question. “Every day I wake up is a good day, a blessed day” he responded. He offered me a granola bar, but I declined. I was in kind of a rush, but for some reason I felt like what Bill had to say was something worth listening to. Over the years, I’ve learned to trust my instincts and that day, as usual, they served me well. He leaned back in his chair and looked up at me and told me this story:
It was Sunday, May 5th, 2013 and he was just waking up. At 57 years old, he had his aches and pains, but nothing out of the ordinary. He figured he’d get up, make some breakfast, have a shower and maybe watch his favorite church programs on TV. He sat on the edge of his bed and pictured his quiet Sunday morning unfolding as it always had. He went to stand up and begin his day when everything went blurry and lost its shape. He closed his eyes and tried to shake it off but when he opened them again nothing had changed. He went to sit back down and collapsed.
I am a pretty typical American mutt. While all of my ancestry that I’m familiar with comes from somewhere in Europe, there is very little that I can identify with. I knew all four of my grandparents, and all four were pretty typically American, if that can be said of anyone. Even my grandmother on my mother’s side, who was actually born in Poland and immigrated to the U.S. as a child, spoke unaccented English and served me macaroni and cheese and sandwiches on Wonder Bread. It is from her mother though, my great-grandmother on my mother’s side, that I have some understanding of my Ukrainian background.
My great-grandmother escaped to Poland from the Ukraine, while pregnant with my grandmother, during the Bolshevik Revolution. She left behind a husband and a son, both of whom were killed under Stalin’s regime. When my grandmother was 5, they got on a boat to the new world. They sailed under the Statue of Liberty on their way to Ellis Island...
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina is an interesting place. It is one of the more developed beach communities on the east coast and is getting more so by the day. It's full of hotels, mini-golf courses, restaurants, shops and bars. Especially in recent years, it has grown to look like a giant submarine sandwich with housing developments sandwiched between the beach and the strip mall that highway 17 has become. You can imagine my surprise, therefor, at finding a beautiful, quiet, minimally developed spiritual center right in the middle of it all. But that is exactly what I found when I entered the Meher Spiritual Center in Briarcliffe, just south of Barefoot Landing...
