Tag Archives: love

Charity: Alzheimer’s Association

As I wrote about last week, this month I am sharing some of my favorite nonprofit organizations that I have had a personal connection to. Since this is the month of love, I thought talking about the charities I loved fit into this month perfectly.

We have been participating in the Walk to End Alzheimer’s Disease since 2010. I saw a commercial while watching a show on Hulu which is how I found out about this organization. My father-in-law had, at that point, been diagnosed with dementia and I knew from my own family experience the long road ahead for my husband. I thought getting involved in an event like this over the years could give him some support and encouragement to know that he wasn’t alone in his experience.

But the Alzheimer’s Association is more than just a walk on a (hopefully) sunny day in the fall. They provide information and support for families and caretakers walking this journey with their loved ones. They lobby government officials for policy and budget lines dedicated to finding both treatment and a cure for this disease.

They host other events throughout the year that provide people with education, even entertainment. One year, they hosted a viewing of Still Alice, a film based on the 2007 novel by Lisa Genova, about a linguistics professor who contracts the disease and how she and her family journey through her inevitable decline. It included a small Q&A at the end of the movie by the organization about new policies and research happening at that time.

But, for the most part, the biggest event for us is the Walk. We have been all over the DFW metroplex for the Walks over the years. Last year, because of COVID, we did a virtual walk, using the app created by the Alzheimer’s Association that included testimonies at different points in the walk and other information and encouragement. It was a creative way to make last year special despite having to be apart.

This year, we are planning on continuing the tradition of participating in the Walk. We will be fundraising more as we get closer to the end of the year and building our team in the meantime. We are so thankful for this organization who has provided such encouragement and support for our family as well as many other families in our community.

If you are interested in participating in the walk this year or getting involved with this organization, please visit them at alz.org.

Word of the Month: Charity

The Worth of Others

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Recently, in our area, a young teenage boy took his own life due to bullying. It breaks my heart that someone so young would believe he was hated so much, believe there was no hope for him, and believe that the only choice he had was to end his life so early. There have been a lot conversations in our neighborhoods and in the media about bullying and what we as a society can do to prevent things like this from happening.

I mentioned in a previous post about realizing my worth in God, that he loves me so much that he would sacrifice his own son so that I could have a chance at a relationship with Him. But I tend to stop there. I want to live my life in a closer relationship with God, and I can get so inward focused that I lose sight of the next logical step.

If I’m worth that much to God, because I was created by him that means that everyone that was created by him is worth that much. That means every person on this earth is worth the redemption of Christ and a chance to have a relationship with God.

That seems overwhelming. However, I don’t think God is tasking any one person to love every person in the world, but I do think that He is calling us to love every person in our life. For some people in our lives, that’s easy. It’s easy to love those who think like us, who live like us, and who talk like us.

But it’s the people who aren’t like us, who disagree with us, who lead lives that we don’t understand, who attack and criticize us for who we are, that we tend to avoid. It’s easy to unfriend, delete, block or isolate ourselves from these kinds of people, but I believe God put these people, these opportunities for love, into our lives for a reason.

When we were still sinners, Christ died for us. When we were still unlovable, angry, critical, judgmental. When we didn’t live our lives in a way that honored God. When we were the kind of people God should isolate himself from, He still came into our lives and loved us anyway. Why should we be any different to the people around us?

We don’t love them so that they will do better in their lives. We aren’t in relationship with them to control their behavior or convert them to our way of thinking. We give them the same worth that God gives to us. We love them unconditionally so that they will know God. God gave us his love to share with others, not to keep to ourselves.

The tragedies in our community are a blatant cry for the love of God and the desire to know our true worth in a cruel and deceiving world. As Christians, we are called to remind others of the truth through our compassion, our love, our words and actions to everyone we meet, lift each other up when we fall, and encourage each other along our journey in this life.

Mercy

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Sorry for the hiatus. It’s been another crazy couple of weeks. I continue to have a love-hate relationship with my technology. My office manager is about to leave on maternity. There are some transitions coming with our church family (new additions to the staff. Very exciting!). So, it’s just been an overall crazy couple of weeks. Oh, and tomorrow is the last day of my summer Spanish class.

I know that I’ve mentioned taking this class on the blog at the beginning of the summer. It has been pretty amazing and so much more than a simple language course. The professor is agnostic, yet he loves to talk about religion, faith, culture, and how these are affected by current events. Of course, if anyone gets too “religious-y,” he tends to shut the conversation down and go back to Spanish. Still, considering the diverse group of individuals in this class (coming from Algeria, India, Japan, Taiwan, Turkey, Thailand, Cambodia, as well as different backgrounds here in the US), it’s interesting to hear all the different perspectives.

In the most recent class, the conversation turned towards the meaning of evil and anger towards evil. They listed off all the usual suspects like Hitler or the 9/11 terrorists as just plain evil people. It got interesting when we started talking about mothers who killed their children due to extreme post-partum depression, whether they should be considered evil or just mentally ill.

I was very quiet, listening to all the comments made. I didn’t realize that my thoughts were showing through on my face though. In the middle of the discussion, a woman turned to look at me and said, “Katy, you look so sad.” I shared that I felt that I couldn’t personally justify labeling someone evil, just writing them off as unredeemable. I think choices can be evil, but for all the sacrifice that Christ made, I just can’t fathom that people are completely unredeemable. Because that could very well mean that I could be unredeemable.

No, I haven’t killed anyone or made some terroristic action against my country. But I have manipulated and hurt people before, and never asked them to forgive me, or even had the chance to ask. I have selfishly indulged in the love, forgiveness, and salvation of God, knowing its relief and yet didn’t share it with others who were searching. I have created the gap between God and myself with my sin, without having a way to repair it on my own, depending on the grace of God to find forgiveness and redemption.

The Bible shows me that I’m not alone. Paul, as Saul, imprisoned men and women. David was an adulterous murderer. Rachel was a manipulative liar. Jonah wanted to commit genocide. Moses was a murderer and had anger issues. The stories in the Bible are not of saints, but of imperfect people, people that could have easily been labeled evil before God’s redemption.

I think something this world desperately needs is an extension of mercy and grace. One guy in my class said that God doles out mercy and grace and man doles out justice. But my question is how will others understand that grace if we don’t first give it ourselves?

I’m, of course, not perfect in this wisdom. I still judge people without mercy and grace. I write off people as ones that can’t or won’t change, forgetting the stories of the Bible that say different. I’m hoping to continue working on this because I honestly believe that if people started experiencing the grace of God through us, that we can change the world. And what better way can we love others, but in the way that God has loved us?

Katy's Life Story

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