KAYLA MUELLER: A PROFILE IN COURAGE...AND COMPASSION

Well, some people are just doing it better than I am. Some people have convictions they are willing to risk everything for-----they are always looking for ways to invest themselves in efforts that are totally outside of themselves…

They help people out of desperate circumstances…everything else can wait. They checked their ego at the door a long time ago. Kayla Mueller was that kind of person.

We don’t know too much about Kayla Mueller of Prescott Arizona. We do know that Kayla is the 26 year old women who was taken hostage in Syria in August of 2013. We do know that she had been held by ISIS since the day she walked out of a Doctors without Borders facility. ISIS recently claimed that Kayla died at the hands of a Jordanian bombing raid. Other reports, purported to be more reliable, claim that Kayla was executed by ISIS late in 2014. She was first given a life sentence…then later executed.

“Syrians are dying by the thousands, and they’re fighting just to talk about the rights we have,” Mueller said in a 2013 interview with local newspaper the Daily Courier. “For as long as I live, I will not let this suffering be normal. (I will not let this be) something we just accept.”

“I am in solidarity with the Syrian people. I reject the brutality and the killings that the Syrian authorities are committing against the Syrian people,” said Mueller. “Because silence is participation in this crime, I declare my participation in the Syrian Sit In on YouTube.”

From a recent profile:

She has long been an outspoken defender of Syrian human rights and worked with the international humanitarian aid agency Support to Life providing aid to Syrian refugees in Turkey. Part of her work included drawing, painting and playing with Syrian children in the refugee camps.

By the time she was 19 years old, she had volunteered with the Save Darfur Coalition for three years, written letters to Congress, and organized silent local walks to raise awareness about the issue,

After graduating from college, she spent time in India teaching English to Tibetan refugee children in an orphanage, according to the BBC. She later spent a year working at an HIV/AIDS clinic in Arizona, volunteering at a women’s shelter at night.

Let me think…what did I do today? I went in the ocean and I had a Brazilian bowl and I picked up my daughter from her friend’s house. I didn’t do anything for anyone today but myself and my daughter…nothing at all…I wasted too much of my time today….I missed an opportunity....

I think the time has come to sing for this (unsung hero). She won’t get as many headlines as Tom Brady, but today is hers.  The world has very few Kayla Mueller’s. She was born without the (me) gene. She died trying to alleviate suffering in the third world…that was her focus,: that was her life. It ended tragically, and way too soon....and there are many losers.