IF YOU LISTEN YOU WILL SEE!

Every year around the 4^th of July, I get together with an old paisano from my old Brooklyn neighborhood, his name is Jim and together we celebrate our birthdays, his is on one day and mine the next. We discovered after the first year that his daughter Laura, a great mom, daughter and wife, had the same birthday as TLW (The Little Woman) and so we invited Laura and her husband Malcolm, a truly devoted father and husband to out dinner get together. Along with this wonderful family is someone very special, someone who when you first meet her you fall in love with, and all the goodness that comes from Jim, his beautiful wife Jasmine and daughter and son-in-law, seems somehow combined into a condensed package in this child Ava.

Ava suffers from Craniofacial Syndrome, a syndrome that affects at childbirth, and is the cause of too many complications for any child to have to deal with.

 

I could tell you about the syndrome, but just click on: http://ellendelbloggolo.blogspot.com/2012/09/september-2012-craniofacial-acceptance.html

 

But today I want to tell you about the child, not the syndrome, I want to tell you about what human spirit is all about. It is the thing you find in grown men, facing battle, scared and frightened, who summon up the courage to fight in wartime. It is the same courage that is called on time and time again when a mother loses a child and gets up each morning to continue, it is that courage that makes heroes live in all our lives, examples of courage.

 

Ava is a sweet quiet little girl about 7 or 8, but don’t quote me on that. She loves life and lives it, and invites everyone in her life to live it too. I see photos of her on occasion on Facebook and it never ceases to amaze me how much she does love life. It is like she is discovering each and every new moment and enjoying it fully. She is life itself. With her comes her mom, Laura, who if I had to sit and listen to her all day long, my sides would be rendered from laughter, she has a great sense of humor and it is in Ava.

 

Ava is very hip, challenging and now! She discovers something and she gets up close to it to understand it. Ava is challenging the rest of the world to see who she is, and when you look, you will hear the truth, she is in God’s image, she is what we all need to be, innocent, loving and enjoying her time on this planet. She does not ask for pity, she does not think the world owes her a thing: she is real in every sense of the word.

 

If I were to have friends, I would want an Ava on my list, at the top. Why, because she will teach me things about the human spirit, she will give me a lesson in old fashion understanding that you NEVER judge a book by its cover, but the content of its soul, and most of all: she will love and teach me to love the right way, with my soul, not necessarily with my eyes only.

So if you someday happen to see someone like Ava, pause a moment and ask yourself to get to understand that love is not based on anything but the heart and soul, and that in front of you is an example of it.