Not Just in War, But in Life

She met her best friend in an underground shelter, while bombs destroyed their town above, and they’ve stayed friends for almost seventy years. She survived the threat of Hitler’s forces, which were in France only 22 miles away, and she joined the army when she was eighteen years old. She learned how to identify enemy planes, and she fell in love with an American soldier who knew he wanted to marry her from the first moment he saw her.  And when an incendiary bomb dropped through the roof of her barracks, she received a medal for keeping it from burning down their whole base.

She also remembers how it felt to be a British citizen unable to see the sky because the Americans, joining the fight against the Nazis, had so many planes in the air she couldn’t see anything else. She remembers how excited she was, how excited they all were! And she didn’t say so, but I bet she remembers the relief, too.

Now, she’s an 88-year-old American woman fighting once more, fighting to survive the difficult rehabilitation that goes with a broken pelvis. At the same time, she’s blind in one eye and living with macular degeneration in the other. But even though she can’t see, her wisdom is clear, and last night she said, “Even the war wasn’t as hard as this.”

A survivor of World War II, she had to be strong, courageous, and determined, and she still has to be, and her piercing words reminded me last night of another reason why it’s so critically important to pray for other people. And when we don’t know what to pray for, we can always pray for strength, courage, determination, and also for peace to fight in difficult times -- not just in war, but in life.