I stayed up till this late tonight to write this post so I could see if another year passing would make it hurt any less…it doesn’t.

Yesterday, June 25, 2008, was the 6 year anniversary of the greatest joy and the greatest pain in my life to this point.

My wife and I welcomed into the world Meghan Elisabeth Daniels at 7:35 am only to say goodbye to her an hour later. That hour and the hours leading up to it were so exciting, we had no idea anything would or could go wrong.

Looking back, it’s a bit odd that Trina and I had a conversation only a few days before she was born where I said to her…”regardless of what happens. No matter how hard things get. No matter how high the high is or how low the low is, God is still God”…I don’t suppose all of that makes much sense for you to just read it here so I’ll fill you in a bit.

Trina and I have miscarried 6 times. Each time hugely painful and disappointing and after that many losses over a 14 year period we elected to adopt and were so excited to learn that a little girl was going to be born and when she arrived she would need a home. Her mother has other children and has been unable to take care of them so she was not even going to try with Meghan…a social worker told her about us and she said she would like us to be the parents to Meghan.

We were and are so honored. This lady who I have never met would trust Trina and I to give that little life a home, guidance, love, nourishing, protection and at the same time we would get so much from her over the years until she would have a family of her own.

So with all of that joy for what was coming and all of the remembering of the disappointments before we saw a little old lady on the street who had dropped a grocery bag…food was everywhere and she was crying as she scrambled to pick it up…as a result she missed her bus and a group of kids were laughing at her. we stopped and helped pick up the groceries. She wouldn’t accept a ride from us because she felt humiliated and embarrassed and on top of all of that, she discovered she had lost he bus money someplace…I gave her some money and made sure she got on the bus alright.

I got bak into the van with Trina and I started to sob for a few reasons.

1) This little lady was alone.
2) How can people laugh at someone so helpless?
3) How am I so fortunate to have a wife and friends who care so much for me?

Ot was all flooding me…the same way it is right now…and I looked to Trina and I said, “I never want our little girl to be so hard hearted that she could ever laugh at anyone’s suffering.” And so we talked about the virtues that would be important for us to model for this little one in our own lives so that she could see that they were valuable…and that is when I suddenly said, no matter what, God is still god…why would I say that?

Anyway, we never held her, we never saw her but strangely every day I see her in my mind and I hold her…I live my life with the ideal that no matter what I do, I not only want my wife to be proud of who she married but also I want to do things that would have made Meghan proud to have me as her father.

So, today it is Six years and a day later. Our arms are still empty, our hearts are broken but full of love and longing for the day when we have our embrace. With all of those things said, we are finally starting to live again, not the life I had known before but a “new normal” that forces you to adapt to simply survive.

I can’t accurately describe just how deeply I miss her or the pain that I endure in missing her or seeing Trina miss her but this was my shot.

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Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s there was no escaping George Carlin. He was brilliant, obscene, shocking and funny.

He died Sunday night after going to the hospital complaining of chest pain.

I’ve never owned a Geroge Carlin CD or book. His style was never to my taste which is why I find it odd that while I was reading his past interviews and the news story about his passing that I found a quote that could have come from my own mouth.

“I was doing superficial comedy entertaining people who didn’t really care: Businessmen, people in nightclubs, conservative people. And I had been doing that for the better part of 10 years when it finally dawned on me that I was in the wrong place doing the wrong things for the wrong people,”

If I am bring honest, I feel much the same way about my last 8 years of performing Stand Up Comedy. Because I’ve censored myself so much that a lot of what I have delivered just wasn’t funny to me. Sure the audience laughed but inside I am thinking I can do so much better.

And I will.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080623/D91FPBTG1.html

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When I was a kid growing up there were a couple of shows I never failed to miss on the weekend days.

1) Fat Albert
2) Wide World of Sports
3) Soul Train

I LOVED Soul Train because the music was so COOL and the dancing was UNBELIEVABLE!

In Columbus at the time I was growing up we only had one Urban radio station that had a hit and miss AM signal, “The Soul of the City, 1600 WVKO”, so Soul Trina represented my weekly fix of music from artists like Marvin Gaye, Al Green, The Jackson 5, B.B. King, Gladys Knight & The Pips, The O’Jays, Smokey Robinson, Sly & The Family Stone, The Staple Singers, Cameo and on and on…you get the idea.

In 1986 when I got my first fulltime job in radio it was for the NEW Urban radio station in Columbus (Johnstown) WZZT Z103 “The Mighty Music Machine”…actually it was one of the first “CHURBAN” stations in the country playing Urban artists alongside Top40 artists with a target of reaching people from both CHR and URBAN markets. Pretty daring at the time and because of stations like that, the urban culture crossed over to the suburbs like we see it happening today.

All of that said, Don Cornelius, who is the founder, creator, producer and brainchild behind Soul Train has sold off the rights to the show and the new ownership group looks like they may be producing new shows sometime in the near future.

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My wife and I were at Mars Hill Church in Grandville, Michigan a week ago and we had the opportunity to learn about STOP THE TRAFFIK from Steve Chalke.

From their website….

Stop The Traffik is a global movement against the trafficking of people. It has more than 1000 member organisations in 50 countries & a grass roots following of ordinary activists around the world. Some of us sign petitions, wear symbols of the campaign, spread the message, and some of us show our support through adapting our lifestyles. We believe that when people act things change.

I want to encourage you to add your name and voice to the fight against human trafficking.

It happens here in the United States, it happens all over the world and the most common victims are young children who are sold into slavery. Sometimes that slavery means they are used for sex sometimes it means for cheap labor.

Also, DO NOT CONTRIBUTE to human trafficking. Be discerning of the products you buy. Look for FREE TRADE and TRAFFICKING FREE labels on the products you buy, particularly CHOCOLATE.

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It is not my intension to be cruel or uncaring to the millions of women who struggle with the decision to have an abortion. Regardless of the decision behind it, the act of abortion is murder. Not mercy, not compassion, murder.

To me, abortion is murder the same way the death penalty is and the same way dropping bombs from planes, jets or off shore ships is. Each act while calculated to a specific target ends up destroying others and ultimately the one who inflicts the death blow.

Not everyone agrees with me, I’m ok with that.

I am not someone who is unfamiliar with the suffering of a child nor the anguish of tough choices in life.

With all that in consideration, I am glad there is one less murder to report.

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A mother who decided to abort her son because he may have inherited a life-threatening kidney condition is overjoyed that he survived the procedure.

Jodie Percival of Nottinghamshire, England, said she and her fiancee made the decision to abort baby Finley when she was eight weeks pregnant.

Percival’s first son Thane died of multicystic dysplastic kidneys — which causes cysts to grow on the kidneys of an unborn baby — and her second child Lewis was born with serious kidney damage and currently has just one kidney, the Daily Mail reported.

Click here for a photo of baby Finley.

“I was on the (birth control pill) when I became pregnant,” Percival, 25, said. “Deciding to terminate at eight weeks was just utterly horrible but I couldn’t cope with the anguish of losing another baby.”

A short time after the abortion, Percival felt a fluttering in her stomach. She went to the doctor for a scan and discovered she was 19 weeks pregnant.

“I couldn’t believe it,’ Percival said. “This was the baby I thought I’d terminated. At first I was angry that this was happening to us, that the procedure had failed. I wrote to the hospital, I couldn’t believe that they had let me down like this.

“They wrote back and apologized and said it was very rare,” she added.

Dr. Manny Alvarez, managing health editor for FOXNews.com, said Percival’s situation is actually quite common.

“Women that have early terminations in weeks six, seven and eight, many times the pregnancy is so small that doctors miss removing the baby,” Alvarez said. “The danger is that the failed attempt can damage the baby. That is why these patients who get early terminations need follow-ups.”

Another scan a week later confirmed the baby also had kidney problems, but doctors told the couple the baby was likely to survive, so they decided he deserved another chance at life.

In November, Finley was born three weeks premature. He had minor kidney damage but is expected to lead a normal life.

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