The Matt Maher Story

hey everybody, it's Brandon. Just before I left for encampment, I heard this song playing on the radio. It has been playing through my head all week, so today I googled it. The song is called "Hold Us Together", written by Matt Maher. I had never heard of him before, so I googled him as well, and found this. This, however, is not the Matt Maher I was looking for.

Turns out, this Matt Maher grew up in our area. He grew up to be a professional soccer player for the Philadelphia Kixx. One night, he was driving drunk on the Atlantic City Expressway and got in an accident. The other driver, a 55 year-old man from Philadelphia, was killed in the accident. It changed the lives of both families. he started giving seminars and classes on being "that guy" because of one wrong decision. He was sentenced to 5 years and 5 months in prison in January of this year, from where he writes his blog.

I had planned to come on here and blog about all the cool stuff I did at encampment, but after reading his story, I think that can wait. It is so important to make right decisions in your life so that we don't end up as "that guy". But while remembering to make the right decisions about ourselves, we need to remember to be "our brother's keeper", which is really what got me about this song. We need to remember to be a leader and a follower so that our brothers and the people who look up to us don't make bad decisions. We need to be an example. That was actually one of the things we learned at encampment and even Civil Air Patrol in general - to be that leader and follower. Someone for people to look up to and know what the right decision is. Hope you are all as inspired by his story as I am.