Hi everyone! Today's blog is gonna be like a WONDERFUL sales pitch for my friend Karen!

See, Karen is walking 26 miles to raise money for suicide awareness. This is a cause close to Karen's heart. Karen decided to walk because a very good friend of hers, Fred, admitted to Kare he had thought about killing himself. Fred had hit a very low place in his life and felt like nothing was going right, or ever would go right.

I guess maybe we all kind of feel like that sometimes. Have you ever worked on a letter and about a paragraph or so into it decided you didn't like it, so you scrapped it and started over? With life, you can't crumple up your mistakes and throw them away. Think about those timed essays in H.S. and college. The way your "paragraph" is when you re-read it is how you are forced to work with it from then on. No erasing, no starting over. The "paragraph" you're facing may not even make sense, form sentances, or even contain words. And yet, the page you've got left to fill seems SO long, and the clock seems to be ticking SO slow. You know you can't continue with this mumbly jumbly stuff, but there's no hope anything intelligible will come into your brain. These are the instances I would pray for a fire drill, a tornado, I'd have visions of contracting some rare Asian 3 hour sickness...anything to get me out of the room, off that paper and to somewhere the answers were...or at least a something to jump start my brain so I could find a direction to move with my essay.

As human beings, we have the opportunity to end the exam all together. We can put an end to the direction our life is headed. Does it seem drastic? Yes. Does it to someone who feels like everything in there life is spiraling downward and it will never get better? No. It's a way to stop the spiral, when nothing else works. I'm sure it was hard for Fred to watch the lives of those around him seem to plateau or rise, when his was constantly spiraling.

How do we react when someone we love and care about seems like their life is valueless? Karen's reaction was anger. She was pissed! How could some she cares about and thinks the world of feel as though he was nothing? Who is HE to take away this person Karen loves? So Karen decided to find out more about this option. Is suicide an option? Do we realize how permanent it is? Do others - teens, children, people in depressed states REALLY think about how FINAL suicide is!?!? Do we teach them? prepare them to deal with depression and low times in life? Is there really help out there?

Karen was lucky; Fred didn't do it. I'd love to tell you this story has a great, happy ending (Hank, you know what a fan of those I am!), but it doesn't. Fred is still trying to find his way. And although emotionally he's not back where he started, he has ruled out suicide as an option and has just "dealt" with his pain and suffering. What KAREN learned, is that not everyone is as lucky as she was. Every day people lose loved ones. These people either didn't recognize the signs or their loved ones never shared their pain and suffering with those around them. The people in charge of the Out Of Darkness walk want to raise the awareness of sucide to hopefully change the statistics of suicide in the United States and through the world.

Karen realizes how lucky she was and how close she came to losing someone she loves so much. It is for this reason, she has decided to walk "for" Fred and all those who have thought about it and for those who have lost someone they loved to it. The walk will not be easy. It will be, not only physically challenging, but emotionally as well as she thinks about what her life would've been life without Fred. Please take a moment or two to check out her website and if nothing else, learn a little more about her cause.

http://homepage.bethepeople.com/display/mp_page.php?page_id=995

I hope you all are doing well! Don't forget Mother's Day is Sunday!!!! :)