Tonight in a restaurant my husband and I saw an old friend of ours.
It was a bitter sweet moment because he and his wife were good friends of ours.
He was a Pastor, had a small church, a great ‘wife’ who loved him and who also was diagnosed with breast cancer.
No fault of her own. It is just something that came to her.
In time, after a year or two, she had surgery to restore what was lost. Not a lot of chemo. Just a new look.
When you marry one of the vows are ‘for better or for worse’. She saw the worse. Parts of her body ‘removed’ and new parts aligned with the ‘old spaces’ left empty.
There was choice he made to ‘discontinue’ his vow. He lost his marriage, his church and He lost his first love.
He left her alone, without insurance, she was still medically ‘fragile’, he said she was not ‘perfect’, no one is.
It was no fault of her own, the scars spoke of courage, of bravery, of letting something go and replacing it with a healing  better place.
He chose. He left her alone. I would encourage her, tell her she was brave. She was beautiful.
So tonight I am struggling with the news he shared. She is in last stage of dying, on hospice. Perhaps tonight.
He complained that family would not let him see her. Then he went to sit down with a lady I didn’t know and eat a meal. Is that right?
Eat a meal with someone who is not ‘your wife’… when she perhaps is dying?
It is not about HIM. NEVER has been.
In first Corinthians a book of the new testament, it says in chapter 13: 13
If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.
9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part,
10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.
11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.
12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
So when someone is dying. Someone you loved at one point in time, is leaving, I miss her already.
Her courage. Her stamina. Her resilience. Her love for HER God.
I have no way of finding out how to find her or see her. She was beautiful, a survivor. A warrior on many fronts.
How should I react? I am sad. She fought hard, then it came back, she fought more and I don’t know the final results. I heard it moved into the bone. The deep and dark and spreading place between morrow and cell giving birth to the wrong cells structure.
Love is NOT conditional. Love is ‘now’, right now.
I am sad for my good friend I know she loves the Lord, but I wish I could hold her hand and tell her ‘you are so beautiful, special and loved.’
Love is a choice. Some choose to not do the very hard.