Someone was at church today whom I saw at the play last night but did not recognize.

I had no idea she was the granddaughter of one of the members whom we had all been asked to pray for a few years ago: she had been pregnant, then the pandemic began, then she found out she had stomach cancer.

It had not looked good.

Today is the first Sunday of the month, when in the Mormon Church people take turns coming up and addressing the congregation as the Spirit so moves them.

She stood.

She was so grateful for all those prayers, and for the ones she knew were to come because there had recently been some bad news again… And that was all she said about that.

The important part, she wanted us to know, is that our good works matter. Our love matters. It matters. Always. Never hesitate.

Later, during a Sunday School discussion, wanting her to know she was not alone on the human front as well as the heavenly, I described being in a hospital bed fifteen years ago too ill to do anything for myself much less anybody else and very very close to death.

Except: I was still me. If I had to go through this (and obviously I had no choice in the matter), then the one thing I could still do was I could pray for every single person who came into my hospital room.

And you can’t pray for someone, and mean it, without loving them.

One doctor confessed later that he’d written on my chart, Patient looks deceptively well. Do not be deceived. Because I was too cheerful.

I said, I knew that the doctors and staff in the hospital see people in their worst moments. If I could love every one of them, that could reverberate forward through all the years they serve there. It could help them to see the best in other patients in whatever circumstances the way I was doing with them, it could potentially ease the burdens on thousands and thousands of people.

The young mom was going, emphatically, YES! YES! You could see the relief in her face that someone got it, how she’d felt and dealt with her own experience a few years ago and that was rapidly coming at her again, someone knew, that what it had been like for her had been like that for me, too. And the result had been blessings. So many blessings. Oh the stories we both could have told each other.

I so loved her for her loving–everybody.

And renewed my prayers for Jordan. And her family, and her medical team. That much, I can do.

And it is no small thing.