Corn and More

Today I went with my small group from church to The Maize, a maze inside a field of corn on a farm near Leesburg, Virginia. That was a fun but freaky trip! The corn stalks were over 6' tall, and you couldn't see much beyond a few feet of corn unless the paths ran close together. The maze was shaped like Joe Gibbs, the Redskins football coach, and some football stuff (helmets and a ball). There were trivia questions inside the maze to help you find your way. There were also other things - a hayride, and those blow-up bouncing cage thingies for little children. It was cool, and I'd recommend it for a fun trip every year. Some pictures:

And at church, they announced a new ministry that they are trying to start up. It provides support to people with cancer. I'm going to volunteer. Cancer is something near and dear to my heart in that it seems to pervade my family. My brother is a survivor; brain tumor. My uncle is a survivor; lymphatic. My aunt is not; she passed away a couple of years ago from pancreatic cancer that spread to her liver. A close family friend is not; he passed away from a rare kind of cancer that started in his stomach. I have a sense of some of what it takes to help out in these kinds of situations, as we've had to endure many of the ordeals that accompany cancer. I can empathize a lot, and I think this is a good way to share strength and show love to people who need it. This is the point of Christianity, right? To be instruments of love to others. It's just one way that we can be used by God to provide succor to people who need it. Maybe this goes hand in hand with the threads about suffering that I've written about; God sometimes uses suffering to demonstrate love and mercy through others. Certainly, cancer is a horrible situation and at first blush you are hard pressed to find anything good coming of it. But it tends to shake the scales off our families' and friends' eyes and wakes us up to the fact that tomorrow is not promised to us. Also, we may begin to realize that we must do our best to live and love others while we are here on this earth. We begin to understand how precious and fragile life is and what it really means to care about someone else. And hopefully, we would find peace and understanding with God, to recognize and appreciate his gifts that we had long taken for granted. I'm not sure in what capacity I can serve, but I want to serve. I think it will be good for me.