JOIN OUR GLOBAL RUN – APRIL 25, 2015
www.facebook.com/MilesForMitchell
Just after Mitch passed away a close friend and neighbor asked if she could organize a run in honor of Mitch. Natalie loves to run so we agreed. At first we were nervous if anyone would show up. To our surprise, the morning of the run, people began to show up.
I had to fight back the tears as I saw runners wearing their Miles for Mitchell T-shirts with a photo of my son on their backs. When he was alive Mitch was just a kid, invisible to the world, and often wondered if he would find a place in it. But on this spring morning of the run it was clear he mattered to people and that he found a place in people’s hearts. I wished Mitch could have seen those who showed up to run in his honor. He would have been in tears. While we were still reeling in the rawest grief, there was something cathartic about that run. Something healing.
We organized the run again in 2014 and were even more nervous to see if people would show up. After all, Mitch was yesterday’s news, so who would care? We had about 50 more people than the first year – a total of about 250 runners. Then, to our surprise, we started to receive photos from people all around the world who were running on behalf of little Mitch. This is a video has some of those photos, but there are many, many more I have not yet shared.
This year, we are having another run in honor of Mitch and we hope to raise enough money to help a lot of people as a result. You can visit our Miles for Mitchell Facebook page to learn about our baseline goals.
I’m not good at asking people for things because all I want to do is serve and give. Yet, I also know that allowing people a chance to serve others is also a form of giving. So I don’t want to take that away from those who want to help but don’t know how.
I’ll share a little more about the run in the weeks ahead. Unfortunately Facebook limits the visibility of my posts to about 2-3% of our followers – so only a small fraction of Mitchell’s Journey will even see this post. My hope is this will spread like wildfire. While we hope to raise $15,000 … in my heart I want to raise so much more, because with more we can do more.
So, on behalf of Mitchell’s Journey, I want to invite all of you to join our run. If you’re local, come run with us. If you live somewhere else, you can run virtually and we can ship your T-Shirts to you.
Wherever you are in the world, if you do run, please send us photos and we’ll make a video with all of the submissions from all around the world. Already we have had people in the UK, South America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Mexico, Russia, Africa and places I've never heard of run in honor of Mitch.
We invite you to join us as we try to move the earth a little closer to heaven.
You can register to run or get a t-shirt here:
www.raceentry.com/race-reviews/miles-for-mitchell
