Prompt: Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.
I was driving home from practice on a Friday night. I had gotten my license just a few days earlier and the driver's education course was still fresh in my mind. So, when my phone began to ring I pulled over to answer it. It was my mom telling me that I needed pick up my brother and sister from the church Halloween party and bring them home. She was unable to, but didn't explain why. So I drive to the church and as I was parking she called again. She told me that my half-brother, Mark Jr., named after my father, had passed away. I sat in the car, praying and crying, then got my siblings and drove home.
My parents weren't home when we got there. My siblings went to bed and I stayed up to wait for my parents. When they got home my mother told me that Mark killed himself. He was facing a divorce and money problems and took his own life.
We were of the first to arrive at the funeral. We sat in the front and I watched family, friends, and people I had never met make their way to the front of the chapel to talk about the impact Mark had on their lives. They talked about his lovingness, his kindness, his ability to cheer people up. All of them cried. He had a tremendous impact on everyone in the room and it was evident.
The pastor, an old family friend, commented on how the effect Mark had on everybody he met was apparent. It was clear by the amount of people present. I turned around to see that every seat in the chapel was full and that more than one hundred people were standing in the back because there was nowhere to sit. Friends had to come all the way to California from as far as Japan to honor him.
If I have an impact that is anything like the way Mark touched people than I will consider myself successful. He had the ability to show relentless love for people. I try to replicate his character in my own life and look at the way he lived for inspiration.
I was driving home from practice on a Friday night. I had gotten my license just a few days earlier and the driver's education course was still fresh in my mind. So, when my phone began to ring I pulled over to answer it. It was my mom telling me that I needed pick up my brother and sister from the church Halloween party and bring them home. She was unable to, but didn't explain why. So I drive to the church and as I was parking she called again. She told me that my half-brother, Mark Jr., named after my father, had passed away. I sat in the car, praying and crying, then got my siblings and drove home.
My parents weren't home when we got there. My siblings went to bed and I stayed up to wait for my parents. When they got home my mother told me that Mark killed himself. He was facing a divorce and money problems and took his own life.
We were of the first to arrive at the funeral. We sat in the front and I watched family, friends, and people I had never met make their way to the front of the chapel to talk about the impact Mark had on their lives. They talked about his lovingness, his kindness, his ability to cheer people up. All of them cried. He had a tremendous impact on everyone in the room and it was evident.
The pastor, an old family friend, commented on how the effect Mark had on everybody he met was apparent. It was clear by the amount of people present. I turned around to see that every seat in the chapel was full and that more than one hundred people were standing in the back because there was nowhere to sit. Friends had to come all the way to California from as far as Japan to honor him.
If I have an impact that is anything like the way Mark touched people than I will consider myself successful. He had the ability to show relentless love for people. I try to replicate his character in my own life and look at the way he lived for inspiration.
