Call to prayer

There are some people who are really on my mind and I would like to solicit prayers on their behalf. You want to know the funny thing? I've never met any of these people, but then again, I've never met many of the people who comment on this blog and whose blogs I read. It just doesn't matter.

The first is a woman in my homeschool group. This evening I found out that a six-year-old girl in our group fell out of a three-story building. She was trying to repel out the window with bedsheets tied to her as she had seen in a TV movie. She fell, was injured, and later died and her funeral was on December 16th. Her mother is a single parent who also has an eight-year-old son and three-year-old daughter. I cannot imagine what this woman is experiencing. The mom's name is Susan and the little girl's name was Ariel.

The second is a friend of a friend. Her name is Muggs and she is a mother of five who was diagnosed about a month ago with a serious form a lung cancer which affects non-smokers; it is advanced. She survived Hodgkin's when she was a teenager. Because of the cancer experience she had years ago, they told her they cannot do radiation and they can't operate. She has begun chemo and she will have six treatments every three weeks, but they don't recommend additional chemo. Her family started a blog here where they post updates about her condition.

The third is Kelli, a wife and mother of two who is suffering from severe kidney failure in her one remaining kidney. Her need for a kidney transplant is seriously a life-or-death situation. Here is a summary which BooMama posted:

Kelli quit work several months ago because, honestly, work was no longer viable with her condition. Her family has their health insurance through her former employer, and that will run out at the end of this month. What I’d love for us to be able to do for her is to cover a portion of her COBRA payments so that she can be free from the worry of being cut off by her private insurance. We all know that sometimes when it rains, it pours - and on top of the COBRA pressure, Kelli’s facing some incredibly expensive post-transplant medicines, the adjustment to being a single-income family, and, more than anything, the realization that if COBRA doesn’t come through - and if she and her husband can’t show the ability to pay for part of the transplant on their own - she’ll no longer be a transplant candidate. Without a transplant, quite frankly, she will die.

Please visit BooMama on Tuesday to take part in the fund raiser she's organizing. I explained her situation to the kids on the way to church and they want to contribute, which touches me more than you can imagine. I'm always telling them not to throw away their money on gum and candy, so this is an opportunity for them to see that there are ways they can do good with it, no matter how little it may seem.

Please take a moment to pray for these three ladies and their families, and may the Lord bless you this week.