Dear Friends,
I just returned from visiting my parents in Kansas City. My father turned 92 on Saturday and Sunday was Father’s Day. I don’t get to see them enough and every visit means so much to me. That being said, my father spends most of his days caring for my 87-year-old mother who has advanced Alzheimer’s. Their day is a set routine of meals, hygiene, the coming and going of home health aides and the precisely scheduled movements from the dining room to the living room and back again. All of this takes place with the background noise of the televisions (one in each room!) constantly tuned to cable news reporting on “news” that rarely changes throughout the day. The only variety in the news cycle seems to be the commercials, and even they lack variety. The vast majority of those are for pharmaceuticals treating all kinds of health issues, with each commercial ending with a string of boxed warnings including, “may cause stroke, heart failure, coma or death.” But there was one noteworthy commercial that had nothing to do with prescription drugs and seemed to counter the background noise of the news: It was a commercial for the 2024 Hyundai Tucson and its tag line was “There’s joy in every journey.” It really stood out. It made me smile – and not just because it provided some levity. It was true! Every time it came on, I shifted my reflection to the innate joy of the journey that I have enjoyed with my parents as their child and the bittersweet journey of aging that I am observing through their experience. It is not devoid of pain, health crises, difficult decisions, challenging choices about budgeting or scary moments – yet there is a joy under it all. It is so easy not to see it. But every time I got my little reminder from Hyundai, I chose to feel it and see it and let it linger like the setting sun in these amazing weeks around the Summer Solstice. Wherever you are on life’s journey or summer travels, I hope that you can see the joy underneath it all, even on the hardest of days. And I hope that realization – however fleeting—reminds you of God’s presence and love as the source of it all.
See you on Sunday!
Love,
Cheryl