I have lots of guesses. Drank or ate green stuff on Saturday for St. Patrick’s Day? Slipped over to the University of Washington where the cherry blossoms are putting on their annual show?

Weekends come and weekends go. Some are a celebration of surviving the work week. Others are savored and drawn out as long as possible until the inevitable Monday morning rolls around again.

This past weekend, something very special happened down in Los Angeles. It was the fulfillment of a promise that a dad made last year. He and his daughter had decided they were going run their first-ever marathon when the L.A. Marathon rolled around in 2018.  The dad was a high school classmate who I’ve blogged about before, Mike Duarte. All the background details are right here.

With reading that, you know that his daughter was one of the 58 people shot dead in Las Vegas last fall by a crazed gunman. Christiana Duarte was celebrating her new job with the L.A. Kings hockey club and taking in a country music concert with thousands of other people.  She and her dad were supposed to begin training for the marathon when they returned.

Mike had made a promise and so on Sunday, after months of training, he ran the L.A. Marathon in Christiana’s memory. Her loss made no sense. Her promising future, extinguished. I can’t even begin to imagine the pain and grief Michael and his family went through and endure to some degree every day.

There were 24,000 people running on Sunday from Dodger Stadium to Santa Monica, including one broken-hearted dad, running for the memory of his daughter and keeping that promise he made to her.

I thought you should know.

God’s peace, Duarte family.

Tim Hunter