Sweeping Up The Shards Of A Broken Dream

I've always considered myself an optimist at heart. Problems always had a humorous side; pain always contrasted neatly with bliss and provided the perfect opportunity for alcohol.

But one day your dreams are shattered. The shards scatter into a hundred fragments painfully piercing your joy. Hope pumps out of you with each heartbeat and you try to stop the bleeding by wrapping the wounds with pitiless self-indulgence.

Yet there is a healing balm. Not in trying to pick up those fractured pieces in a futile attempt to reassemble what is forever lost, but in sweeping up the shards of a broken dream to clear them forever from your life. There are new dreams waiting for us all if we make room for them. New opportunities to rise above destruction and do what we CAN to make our lives happily worth living.

Few people truly inspire me, but Dick and Rick Hoyt are among them. They are the father and son who form Team Hoyt and together compete in marathons, triathlons and other grueling feats of endurance -- an amazing thing when you consider that Rick can neither walk nor talk.

Theirs is a story of sweeping aside every family's dream of sweet health to make room for a new kind of hope. It is about love through action and inclusion. And it is a tale worth remembering.



Thanks for the link, Terry.