Jason Bullard article reprinted from the Statesville Record & Landmark

[this article appeared in the Statesville Record and Landmark a couple of months ago]

Sometimes life has a strange way of teaching you about priorities.

On Sept. 10, 2001, I went to bed angry at the world. How were my Broncos supposed to contend for the Super Bowl after Ed McCaffery broke his leg earlier that night on Monday Night Football? Why did this always happen to my teams?

The next morning, I woke up.

Earlier this week, I got another such lesson.

Thursday, I took the opportunity of a rare mid-week day off from work to visit my parents. At some point, my mother brought up how uncommon it was for me to be away from work in the middle of the week. I responded with trademark overstatement: "Yeah, and if the Spurs lose tonight, it's going to be the worst day off ever."

Little did I know.

Later that night, with the Spurs sleepwalking through another loss, I was pleasantly surprised to get a call from Britt, my best friend of nearly a dozen years.

We had chatted aimlessly about the game for a couple of minutes when Britt suddenly dropped a ton of bricks on me.

"Um ... Pam passed away."

"Pam" is Pam Darnell, a friend of ours from high school. I knew she had dealt with some health issues, but I had no idea they had become so serious. After all, she was only 22 years old.

Here's all you need to know about Pam: She was the most kind, caring and genuine person I've ever been blessed to know.

I had known her since I was in first grade, when we'd jokingly snipe back and forth in Sunday school. As we grew up, it became clear that Pam wasn't just a run-of-the-mill person. She was funny, she was smart, she was nice to everyone she ever encountered and she never said an unkind word behind someone's back.

Even in high school, she displayed a maturity that very few adults can approach.

In death, the words "kind," "caring" and "loving" are often thrown around as compliments of the deceased, sometimes heaped upon people who don't deserve such praise.

Pam did.

Even before she died, people who knew Pam always spoke of her in almost reverential tones. I always felt like I was in the presence of something special; that if I could ever be nearly as genuine and wonderful a person as Pam, I'd consider my life a success.

Pam spoke and, most importantly, acted like a Christian. She was heavily involved in Campus Ministry at Gardner-Webb and, as a testament to how many lives she touched, five pastors presided over her funeral service.

Like Pam, I have a firm faith in God. But when things like this happen, it's only natural for me to question things.

As Britt and I choked back tears over the phone that night, we couldn't answer that one key question: Why do bad things happen to good people?

Finally, Britt came up with an answer that seemed rife with hyperbole.

"Maybe," he said, "Pam was just too good for this world."

In this case, though, that idea didn't seem so far fetched.

Jason Bullard