Last week a Chinook helicopter crashed in Iraq
One of the soldiers on board was the thirty year old brother of one of our dental assistants

She is one of the bright smiles in our clinic


Today her brother, CW2 Jackie McFarlane, was laid to rest

And I learned that this man had lived more and touched more lives and hearts in his short thirty years than many of us will achieve in sixty or more years

He married his high school sweetheart and with her had a lovely family

He was a highly decorated soldier

He was an ordained minister

He touched lives and hearts and minds both here and abroad


I felt the sentiments expressed by one woman to be quite uplifting and I am sharing them here:

A family member distributed forks throughout the congregation with a parable
And I am paraphrasing here, but the ultimate message was that life is a banquet
And as you use your 'fork' to relish the good eats with gusto, you also swallow the distasteful servings . . . and move on . . .

At the end of the "meal", you hold on to your fork . . . because you know the best is yet to come . . . dessert

The fork represented that the "best" for this amazing man was ahead of him

God Bless