Life as we know it is a span so short in duration that should we blink, our lives are past. Mortality is a fabric woven tight with strips of lingering sorrow, peaks of ecstacy, valleys of despair and experiences best described in retrospect as bittersweet. In birth we cry, in life we laugh and weep, in death we wait and wonder. Against this mandatory school called earth we sometimes pass with flying colors and other times we simply do not make the grade. It's not the winning that exalts us in the end, it's the getting up for the bell when our faces are bloodied, when we have all but been counted out lying face down on the canvas of life. When enduring to the end seems less daunting than getting by until tomorrow, the prospect of eternity is blurred, but yet we take one baby step at a time, without acclaim but holding fast to faith until we finish with the victor's sprint.

-M. Dwight Hurst