The outpouring of love for John and I throughout the past three months has been incomparable to anything we have experienced. Everyone from our family and lifelong friends, to friends we more recently met, to friends of friends that we have never met, to people who live across the country, to complete strangers who we will never meet, we have been showered with endless words of encouragement, prayers, messages, and gifts.
However, there were three families in particular who’s outpouring of love made a significant impression on me. They served us while in the midst of their own hurdles, their own pain, and they did so with pure intentions.
In one family, the husband and father faces his own battle with chronic illness. They knew exactly what life was like for me in the hospital. His wife could relate to everything I was thinking and feeling. She knew the exact words to say. She knew the specific ways I needed comfort.
The other two families are young women, about my age with young children, who in the past year lost their husbands to illnesses. One was completely unexpected. Knowing that my outcome could be the same, they jumped to my need and embraced me with love.
It is hard for people to come outside of themselves and empathize with others in their hour of need. I know it is hard for me. This is something that typically does not come easily for me. However, I think that for someone who is struggling in similar ways, and possibly just as much, it can be harder. On one hand, they know specifically how to serve a person in need because they remember what they needed. But on the other hand, it is hard to put someone else’s pain before your own and recognize it as priority, and it is even harder to genuinely hope for the best for that person when your circumstances turned out differently.
These three families served us despite their pain, and through their service to us they were an example of Jesus’s second greatest commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Matthew 22:36-40. Possibly without even knowing it, through loving us as themselves, they taught me how to come outside of my own self and love others. There example has reminded me that there is pain all around us. John and I are not the only ones going through a season of uncertainty and pain. Their example has helped me to remember that we are no different than anyone else. So when I start to ask God, “Why me?”, I remember to say instead, “Why not me?” God gave us community to serve each other in these times by putting our own wants, needs, and rights aside and reaching out to those around us.
I am very thankful for these three families who followed His commandment, and who was Jesus to me despite their pain.