Please permit me

Please permit me to ask you all to put us on your prayer lists.

We just got home from the lung doctor - and my Dad has lung cancer. He has (at best) 6 months if we do nothing - and a year or so if we do.

And before you ask, he is 82, and yes, he smoked - heavily. (If you do - please quit.)

My Mother passed away in January 2004. She was almost 85 and also a smoker. But what I remember most about her illness was folks asking her age, and did she smoke.

We seem to have this fascination with wanting to know the ages and circumstances of folks' illnesses. If someone is in a wreck, we immediately want to know if there was drinking involved and if they were wearing their seatbelts. It seems, in some curious way, to give us relief if we don't do what they did, or do, what they didn't.

I've since come to believe, that when Job's friends kept asking what he did to bring the (seemingly) "wrath of God" upon him and his household, they weren't trying so much to discern his sin, as they were trying to ease their own consciences that they weren't in danger of receiving the same thing!

We live in a fallen world. It "rains on the just and the unjust." True, there are things we can do to improve our health and circumstances, but everyone is going to die of something.

The key is not what we'll die of, it's Who we're living for...

And Daddy serves God. But that won't keep it from being a difficult "row to hoe..."

Thanks
Betty