Fighting the Adversities, Fighting the Good Fight

Friendships are born in face of great adversities. I can guarantee you no less. It is when the greatest of odds and the greatest of challenges do friendships truly and so evidently show themselves than at any other time that one's actions might even seem fool-hearted in nature. It is not the best of times you find your true friends, but it is in the absolute worst of times. It is like when Christ was crucified, all those many years ago, that He saw who his true friends were. It was not Peter, nor any of the other disciples, but that of His Blessed Mother, who stood through it all to be by His side until death and beyond.

So it was similarly this past week, in the student body elections here on campus. The allegations and arguments spewed forth well before the start of the week and grew to be tantamount to a feverish torrent of twisted lies and charges to defame the integrity and honor of a good and well-deserving person. Well before the start of last week, with the student judicial hearings but a week ago to the day, I joined her cause, Marcella Colbert's cause to clear her name. It was in finding that I sought her out, and with questions she in turn sought me out for my concerns. This encounter made a lasting impression on me, for her genuineness in her cause and in her general ethics of conducting herself. I needed no panel of student justices to prove to me, those three and a half days earlier, that she had conducted and continues to conduct herself with "the utmost integrity."

Still today I know she did the right thing in every manner, and I did the right thing to help her cause. Unfortunately, however, the student body did not give her a chance to lead, voting in a 3 to 1 favor of the other candidate, Jim Carlson. I find that her grace through it all has been the best thing to come out of the entire ordeal. It matters not that she won the contest now but that, in the end, she cleared her name, in spite of all odds and in spite of all enemies that have arisen. She's fought the good fight, and that is what matters most of all.

In that, I have found a good friend that I know I can trust.