FaithWorks Stories: Faith

The Physician asked that I visit a patient that he had just informed that he had cancer.  As I entered the room, he looked like a deer in headlights just staring at the ceiling.  Like almost everyone who has just heard devastating news, he was having difficulty processing the information.

We chatted briefly, and then I said, “Tell me about your faith.”

He started off by saying that he did not go to church and that he had not read the Bible since childhood.  I interrupted and said that all that might be important, but that I had not asked him about any of that.  “I asked you about your faith.”

“Oh, I believe in God.”

“Then, that is where we will start.”  As we began to wind up the visit, I told him, “Look, I do not know how this story is going to end, but I do know that God is not going to leave you alone in this.  He is going to send his angels and they are going to look like physicians, nurses, and a bunch of other people that you do not know even exist.”

When I visited him the next day, he yelled at me “YOU WERE RIGHT!”

“Tell me your story,” I said.

“Right after you left yesterday, the first person in my room was a transporter who had come to take me to get measured for radiation.  As she pushed me through the halls, she informed me that she had survived the very same cancer that I have.  Not only that, she lives in my neighborhood (he lives in a town an hour away from Brunswick), and I can see her house from my back porch!  The first person God sent me was an angel who understood.  I think that I can beat this thing!”

It does not take a lot of faith to find hope.  Just faith in God.