Winners and Servants

Business first:  Congrats to the first random winners of Faces of Syria, which just went to the printer yesterday!

• Anita Yoder, the 27th comment on the blog post: Check out her blog! http://lifeisforlivingbook.com/
• Susan Hoover, the 13th comment on my Facebook post: a fellow nurse! One of my favorite pages in the new book is a quote from a nurse.

Next, Saturday, I will post another contest…the question will be, “Who do you know with a servant heart? (Someone who is always helping others.)  I mention it now so you have some time to think.  If you win (once again, by random choice), I will mark you down to get two copies of Faces of Syria  when it is released, one for you, and one for the person you name.  That will be my post next Saturday, October 24th.

Speaking of servants, let me briefly tell you about the one who stopped in to see me today: my friend Kendra Gingerich. She was out shopping, and said she had a question for me and might swing by, and then asked if I would like a Starbucks drink.  (“That’s funny!” I replied.  “Of course!”)  When she stopped in, she explained that she has a teenage friend who needs a place to stay, and she wondered if one of my upstairs rooms is available.  I told her they aren’t exactly yet, but with a few renovations, they could be. Her friend has no children, which is important because my rooms are not set up well for children (as I discovered last fall), and are only reached by a wooden staircase suited to creating skull fractures in toddlers.

This friend also struggles with depression, she told me as we stood in my front room with the windows facing the street and the fall leaves outside.

“I told her, ‘I can take you to the mental hospital, and they can help you better than I ever could’,” Kendra said to me.  “And she said, ‘I’ve been to places like that, and it’s so depressing, because everybody has problems’.”

Holding my pumpkin spice latte, I looked at Kendra and remembered my days in my mental health rotation in nursing school, when I was at probably the lowest point of life, struggling with depression myself.  I had thought I might like to work in mental health, until I got there.  I remember the man who ran up and down the locked hallway, without clothes, and the girl who threw herself on the ground in a fake seizure, and the prison-like doors that you needed special passes to enter.  Just remembering makes me almost sick to my stomach, without remembering medication errors that almost caused me to fail my last rotation, which probably would have kept me from graduating.

“I know how she feels,” I said to Kendra.

But what lights up my memory of that horrible time, is that I had a friend in my class, Cynthia Miller, who was the calm in my storm.  (I didn’t know this would make me cry, but I just had to leave my computer for a second to wipe away the tears. After wiping my eyes, I went to a storage box, marked “Graduation” and found the card she gave me.)

  
When we graduated in the spring of 2011, she wrote this, inside the card:

You did it! I will miss you-your humor, laugh, sense and sensibility, just you! You’re a beautiful lady and will be a great nurse, especially when it comes to patient teaching! (Notice she didn’t say medication administration!) I’m praying with you and for you about your future…and praying you feel peace and joy in the moment.  Congratulations!  I love you! Cynthia

I looked at Kendra again.

“In my opinion,” I said, “having you as a stable friend in her life, may be more than the mental health hospital could ever do.”

“Maybe you’re right,” she said.

That’s my double servant story for the day!  I’ll be waiting to hear about the servant in your life, next week.