Now that it is no longer October, can I say that all the breast cancer awareness stuff from October got on my nerves just a little? Let me backpedal...I am ALL in favor of raising money to fund breast cancer research, ALL in favor of anything we can do to beat this dumb stupid horrible disease, and am in favor of raising awareness so more women get earlier testing leading to better treatment...but...
this last month seemed like overkill. Every football team. Down to their shoelaces. Every tv show. Every ad in my Sunday paper. The COMICS in the Sunday paper. After awhile I feel like you're just jerking unnecessarily on my heartstrings to try to extract more money from my wallet. I feel like you're slapping a breast cancer pink ribbon on something just to get me to buy something I don't really need. It's not the breast cancer awareness I'm opposed to, its the underlying rampant materialism in our culture that exploits strong emotions everyone has connected to breast cancer (since 1 in 8 women are affected) to try to sell us more stuff. That's what makes me sick. There are so many horrible diseases out there, why dedicate a whole month so intensely to one? Granted, it is a terrible one, it took my best friend way too young, but I felt like the overexposure to breast cancer awareness almost trivialized it to the point of oversaturation. I think the breast cancer survivors and co-survivors are brave, amazing, and "inspirational" (wink wink Kandice haha), and deserve to be honored, but so do many others. I guess this month just hit me hard, and punched where it hurt. I almost wished everyone would shut up about breast cancer already. But now that it's November, I'm angry because they won't even think about it again until the Pepto Bismol colors get vomited everywhere next year (that is, if it's still trendy and can sell more product), whereas I will still remember breast cancer every day, and how amazingly brave my friend Kandice was through it and how well she lived victoriously over cancer.
So although breast cancer awareness month is over, my awareness of it is not, nor is my awareness of God's grace in the midst of pain.
Oh what an unjust, sin-filled, destroyed, fallen world we live in. It breaks my heart and it makes me angry, but at the same time I see God's grace to us and give thanks.
