The best things you have done are also the hardest. The story doesn’t write itself, the ink refuses to fill the painting without the artist’s suffering hand. I know this, yet it is what is expected of you. You must challenge yourselves to rise above the appeasement of those that seek mere power to fill your creation with meaning if you are to continue to receive my faith and my loyalty. Though I have persevered and returned year after year don’t take me for granted.

I am but one small voice in a sea of chatter and do not expect to be heard. Like a whisper in a hurricane these words will fly away and join the cacophony, lost and forgotten. That is fine. No one expects to change the world alone--no one sane, that is. But sometimes small things said by small people do echo and reverberate. Perhaps this will, too.

Give me the power of my convictions, my choices, my perseverance, for they are all I can afford to give to you.