The Bumper Sticker

It's just before 7 a.m. and I am driving to work.  The sun is peaking from behind the mountains.  My car stops behind a pick up truck at the intersection.  I wait to turn right.  I am third in line.

I read the bumper sticker on the back of the the tailgate -"Defeat DIPG".  It takes but a moment to realize I am behind my neighbor. 

How many people have followed behind him unaware of the meaning behind the bumper sticker?  How many have thought it was nothing more than a $1 purchase slapped onto the back of a tailgate?

Maybe it cost a dollar, but the adhesive in which it sticks to the tailgate came at the cost of his 6 1/2 year old daughter.  A bright, beautiful light snuffed out by an incurable and cruel disease.

It wasn't just a bumper sticker.
It was a proclamation of the wounds he bore.

I think about the wound losing a child brings.  A pain so sharp, the wound is that of a bleeding gash in which you do everything to stop the bleeding.  Eventually, slowly, the wound begins to heal.  The pain shows itself as a cut.  Yet a single word, a smell, a memory opens  the wound wide and once again all energy is devoted to stop the bleeding.

Those are the dark days.  The days you wonder if you'll ever see a sunrise again.

I glance to my left at the mountains and the still rising sun.  The sky is alive with color.

There were many days I had wondered if the sun was rising.
It was. I just couldn't see it.
The wounds from those days are scars now; never gone but a very near reminder. 

Not a single one of us doesn't have a cut in need of healing.  
Maybe it's a wound bleeding uncontrollably.
Maybe it's a scar.

But it's there.

You know what else is there?  The sunrise.
There may be days the clouds are so thick, you can't see it.
But it's there.

It just may be tomorrow before you can see the colors the sunrise brings.