Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Richard - My Brother, Friend, and Mentor

I am currently in Colorado visiting my family and my in-laws, having Christmas in Colorado was way overdue as I haven't saved up enough PTO to make the trip in the last two years, this year given the looming deployment, we packed up the dogs and headed north.

The day we arrived in Colorado is when I found out the news that our Scretary, Richard was in ICU and things didn't look good. All last week and during Christmas Mass I was thinking and praying for my dear friend Richard. He is going through chemo for lung cancer treatment. He was having a rough time, had become dehydrated to the point that his kidney's shut down and he was admited to the hospital. Yesterday I got the news from Bro Bill that he was moved from ICU to a regular hospital bed and was awake. When I called him, he was disoriented and just wanted to go home, I felt helpless here in Colorado, while he was laying in a hospital bed in San Antonio.

Richard is the kind of Mason that we should all be, he didn't play politics, but is heavily involved in the higher degrees of the York Rite and the Allied Masonic Degrees (he couldn't come to my initation because of his chemo treatment). But with all of that his best love is the blue lodge. He is a past master, but didn't try to run the show. He always wants to do what's best for the lodge. He challenged me to start Masonic education, and he also inspired me to start our lodge's website, and worked with me the entire time.

I hope that my brother, my friend and my mentor Richard has a quick recovery, and that he will be sitting in lodge during my January Masonic Education talk.

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