February 24th, 2022 By Bay City Roller

PAX

Skinner

Mountie

El Ab

Hipbone

Spud

Marlboro

Luthor

Java

Firechicken

Neverland

Goony

Private Ryan

Mayweather

 

Mosey to new deck, swerve right to open parking lot so Skinner wouldn’t abandon us upon entry to forbidden deck

Warm Up:

SSH x20ic

IST’s x10ic

Loose Change x10ic

Arm Circles fwd/back

Windmills x5 OYO

 

THANG

Start at Memorial Garden parking lot

Merkins x10

Low Flutters x10ic

Burpees x4

Run to OCT and grab a block for

Curls

Military press

Skull crushers

Toe Touches

all x10

Run back and repeato

 

Wrap up at Memorial Garden parking lot at 0600 and circle up for the Q to share some real talk with some real friends.  Sprint back to OCT at 0620 for COT and prayer.

 

PRAYERS

Hip’s daughter starting new job

Marlboro’s aunt Rita to get well soon

 

 

MOLESKIN

Unfortunately, today was probably a show to know kind of deal.  Hard enough to try and get the words out this morning, much less write them back up.  Most of you know my middle child, Ella, died when she was just a baby.  Monday was her birthday and she would have been 4 years old this year.  I don’t talk much about the time from when her heart defect was diagnosed in utero to when she died in our arms waiting for a heart transplant.  Every day of my life is still filled with that grief, and that will never go away.  Somewhere along the way somebody told me something that stuck though – grief is just love building up in your heart that has nowhere to go anymore.  If the grief never ends then it is because I never stop loving her, and thinking about it that way makes it a lot easier to swallow.  Someone else once told me that losing a loved one is like becoming an amputee.  You will never get that part of you back, even though you get phantom pains and can feel it there. But you can and will learn to adapt and live your life in spite of that loss.

 

Like I said this morning, we all have our own personal tragedies.  Tragedy isn’t a competition, mine isn’t better or worse than yours.  We’ve all had to lose someone or something important to us and we all have a right to be devastated by that.  Nobody has a monopoly on tragedy.  Regardless of the tragedy you face, we men – husbands, father, sons, brothers – don’t have the luxury of despair.  We’ve got kids, wives, employees, customers, etc…all counting on us.  There’s nothing I would like more than to ball up in a corner and stay there or crawl into a bottle.  Still every day when I pull in the parking lot at work in the morning I just want to sit in my car and cry rather than face the day.  But I don’t have that option, and neither do you.

 

I’m here to tell you, in the face of unimaginable tragedy you have a choice.  You can choose to let it tear you apart and eat you alive.  That’s the easy choice.  Or you can choose joy.  You can choose to get up every day and persevere, despite overwhelming hurt.  That’s the harder choice.  It is not an easy path, but trust me when I tell you that the hardest part is to force yourself to choose that and mean it.  We practice this every day, when our legs are tired and our lungs burn we keep going.  And we keep going faster and longer than we thought we could when our brother is right next to us pushing through as well. And then the next morning when the alarm goes off before the rest of the world is awake, we get up and do it again.

 

So choose joy.  And once you find it, use it to Be A Light to others in their darkness.

 

 

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