Grace

I was at the pool yesterday, beating the crap out of myself once again.  (The other day, a lady in the next lane said, "My, you sure work hard with all those weights and things."  My reply was, "Sometimes I win, sometimes they win."  Cracked up the lifeguard.)

One of the young women who works out at the pool is missing her right leg from about five inches below her knee joint.  She doesn't let it stop her, though...  She looks a lot better in her bathing suit than I do in mine!   She's completely unselfconscious about her leg.  Yesterday, on the way back to the locker room after her swim, she stopped to talk to a little guy in the kids' pool.  She was congratulating him on how far he could swim...said pretty soon he'd be swimming in the big pool.  

"Where's your leg?"  he asked, as kids will inevitably do.

"It's in there (the locker room) waiting for me.  It's a fake one, so I can't get it wet.  I have to take it off when I swim."

She took it right in her stride, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be missing a leg.  What grace in the face of adversity!  It made me wonder what I would be doing if the same thing happened to me.  I probably wouldn't be seen in a swimsuit in public, much  less stopping to talk to little kids in the shallow pool.  I KNOW I wouldn't have been able to deal with the questions.  This girl deserves a medal or something.  What an ambassador for people with disabilites...and you know, I bet she doesn't think of herself as disabled at all.

Just goes to show that the challenges really do go to those who can handle them the best.  Or that a heaping helping of grace goes along with them.