When Giving a Lift Means Getting One

Investing in a stock called Encouragement pays huge and immediate dividends. The stock can be traded any time, any day, unlike the ones on Wall Street that close at the four o'clock bell.

This morning I made such an investment. I called a longtime friend, Sandy, who lives with her husband and six children in New Hampshire. For the past two and a half weeks my heart has been so heavily burdened that I've prayed on the spot every time for her. I knew her mother has cancer, and the last time Sandy and I spoke six weeks ago, her mom was subsisting on Ensure, had the energy only to lay on the couch, and was downtrodden in spirit. I wondered if the heaviness of heart I felt meant that Sandy's mom had passed away.

So I called. The good news was that no, her mom was better than she's been in a long time, and had actually just visited them for the past eight days and were heading to Virginia Beach to visit with friends. Her mom was off chemo, feeling stronger, more lively (enough to play many rounds of Scrabble) and had a peace that didn't exist as of two months ago.

"What else is going on?" she pondered aloud, "that God would put me on your heart?" Well, in short, two people in her church and one in her homeschool group have Stage 4 cancer. All of them. Stage 4. Another friend, in Colorado, is taking care of her husband who was in a serious motorcycle accident while visiting one of his friends in Tennessee. Both legs were shattered, and one shoulder is severely injured. He was too injured to travel, so his wife came from Colorado to the hospital in Tennessee. They are both back home now, but he'll be at least six months in a wheelchair. Their daughter was married just days before the accident and moved to California, a sweet but sorrowful parting that only parents of adult children understand.

That left Sandy realizing that she's been interceding and caring for a lot of very seriously ill people and helping their loved ones find hope. As anyone who knows Sandy can attest, she is absolutely the kind of person who first comes to mind when you need a ray of hope. She was the second person I called --right after my mom--when I got the devastating news after Joel's delivery that I had ruptured all my pelvic ligaments and would not be able to walk unaided for at least five weeks. I was so crushed and so in need of a hug. Sandy lived five minutes from the hospital, my mom lived 45 away. Sandy got there first. She hugged me through the aftermath of the news that, to me, sounded terminal. I can't imagine hearing "malignant. " In my pain , hearing "five weeks of bedrest with a newborn" was too much to bear alone.

So my investment in calling her was that her voice from the first "hello?" went from that of a burdened person to one who had just been lifted by a hot air balloon. (Ooh, maybe that's not the best analogy. I am full of hot air.) She was so glad to know that she had been carried in prayer while tending to so many needing her prayers. What a God we serve! What a beautiful Body of believers we're part of. Time and distance are irrelevant in God's economy.

As a side note, Sandy is rethinking that her nursing career ended before motherhood. She was an oncology nurse before she was a Christian, before she had kids, and before she realized that she would rather have majored in history. Her mom had counseled her to choose a nursing career to give her "something to fall back on." Well, she nurtured her passion for history by homeschooling for umpteen years (still doing that) and God is bringing her to a place where's in contact with the Boston Cancer Center about getting recertified. Pretty amazing how God uses everything -- even a degree that she would've traded for something more immediately satisfying--to work for His glory.