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What's your role when your friend is going through a hard season? When she gets the cancer diagnosis, suffers a miscarriage or loses a family member?
For over 25 years Proverbs 31 Ministries' mission has been to intersect God's Word in the real, hard places we all struggle with. That's why we started this podcast. Every episode will feature a variety of teachings from president Lysa TerKeurst, staff members or friends of the ministry who can teach you something valuable from their vantage point. We hope that regardless of your age, background or stage of life, it's something you look forward to listening to each month!
Kaley:
Well, hello friends. Welcome back to the Proverbs 31 Ministries Podcast, where we share biblical Truth for any girl in any season. I'm your host, Kaley Olson, and I'm here with my friend and my cohost, Meredith Brock.
Meredith:
Well, hi Kaley. It's really good to be here today. I almost didn't make it. I had all the car troubles, guys. It was an adventure, but we are here, and I am grateful.
Kaley:
I am grateful too. And you guys can't see it, but Meredith is wearing an awesome top knot because you have to throw the hair up whenever you're running behind—
Meredith:
On the days when the car doesn't work, and your husband's out of town, and it is cold, you go for the top knot.
Kaley:
There you go. There you go. Well, Meredith, can you believe that this is our very last episode of 2020? What in the world?
Meredith:
This year equally flew by and crawled by.
Kaley:
Yeah, it was a very odd sensation of a year, I would say so. But, in light of a wild year, there's a lot that we can focus on that wasn't good. But there's a lot of things that we can focus on that [were] good. I want to just give you the floor to share some highlights from this year. What were your favorite moments?
Meredith:
Well, I'll say that probably the biggest thing I'm grateful for in 2020 is my husband and I took the big step of faith to become foster parents. We got our foster license early on in the year, and then we have our first placement right now, a little boy, Baby Z, and we are loving it. He is a gift and every day is an adventure with him and with the whole process of fostering. But it has just been a really, really big blessing to our family.
Kaley:
That's awesome.
Meredith:
Yeah. What about you, Kaley? What are you grateful for in 2020?
Kaley:
Yeah. Well, I was thinking about this earlier and my husband and I are both in ministry and typically our weekends look like passing ships in the night, where I have Saturdays by myself. He's gone. And then Sundays are odd too because that's what happens whenever you work in ministry. But this year, because COVID has made everything have to be online, we've gotten a lot more downtime together than we typically would. I think it's a small thing that other people might miss because it seems normal, but to us it's not normal, so I'm really grateful for the time that we got to just slow down.
Meredith:
That's awesome.
Kaley:
It was great. It was great.
Meredith:
I love that.
Kaley:
Cool. Well, Meredith, we have a great guest with us today that I'm excited to finally welcome on the show. Everyone, please welcome Marissa Henley. Thank you for being with us today.
Marissa:
Hey ladies, I'm happy to be here with you guys.
Meredith:
Well, Marissa is part of our First 5 writers team and has been with the ministry for a year and a half. We're so glad she's here to share a bit of her own personal journey with us on the podcast today. But before she does, we want to get to know her a little bit better. Marissa, why don't you tell us where you're joining us from? Maybe tell us what you're grateful for in 2020. We'd love to hear that.
Marissa:
Sure. Well, I'm joining you guys from Northwest Arkansas today. And 2020, despite the 2020ness of it all, has been a good year here, and we're so thankful. I think one of the highlights for me was that my oldest turned 16 in February. Honestly, I was dreading it. Just the anxiety of my child driving a car by himself. But this fall, when the world has started to open up a little bit more, and he's driving his siblings to and from school, and to and from piano lessons. Y'all, it is amazing. I had no idea how life-changing it would be to have ... You know how you say sometimes you want to clone yourself because you need to be in two places at one time?
Meredith:
Yes, yes.
Marissa:
It feels like I've done that now. I'm at home cleaning the kitchen and he's driving my sixth-grader home from school and it's—
Meredith:
This sounds lovely. I have something to look forward to.
Marissa:
Yes.
Meredith:
Because I am very much in the throes of, "Can there possibly be two of me? How can we make that happen?"
Marissa:
Right.
Meredith:
That's awesome. I love it. I love it.
Marissa:
Yeah. It's so great.
Kaley:
Yes. Well,
Marissa, today, is going to talk a little bit about how to love a friend going through a cancer diagnosis. While we are so grateful that she's going to share this with us. Because, I mean, Lysa TerKeurst herself has been through cancer—
Meredith:
That's right.
Kaley:
And we know that if you're listening right now, chances are you know someone—
Meredith:
You've been touched by cancer some way or another.
Kaley:
[Crosstalk]. Yes. I don't know the statistic. But I do know that depending on where you are in life right now, this might be a very sensitive topic to you. If you're navigating grief related to a cancer diagnosis, or if this feels a little bit too hard to listen to right now, I just want to give you permission to come back later—
Meredith:
That's right.
Kaley:
... because we always want to lead with grace and just full transparency in what we're sharing on the podcast today. But today's teaching is going to be hopeful because I'm so excited for Marissa's teaching. So, Marissa, you can go ahead and dive right in and Meredith and I will go ahead and take notes.
Marissa:
Okay. Well, I just want to say upfront that what I'm sharing today, about taking care of a friend and supporting her as she walks through cancer—I am not an expert on this topic because I am a really great friend to other people. I have learned a lot about this topic because my friends were so amazing to me when I was the one walking through cancer. I just am so thankful to be able to share their example of how they loved me so well so that we can all do a better job of coming alongside the people that we care about. Whether they're going through cancer or some other type of suffering.
Marissa:
For me, it was about 10 years ago, in October of 2010, when I was diagnosed with a rare cancer that I had never heard of called angiosarcoma. It was the day before my 34th birthday. I had three little kids at home. My boys were six and four, and my little girl was 18 months old. The prognosis was not good. The angiosarcoma has a five-year survival rate of about 30%. It was a really difficult time, and I needed a lot of treatment to try to conquer this cancer. It's very aggressive and obviously very life-threatening. My treatment process was about nine months. I had seven rounds of chemo—
Meredith:
Wow.
Marissa:
—most of which took place as a part of a clinical trial at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. And, as I mentioned, I live in Northwest Arkansas, so it's about a 10-hour drive from Houston. I ended up needing to basically live in Houston for two out of every three weeks for several months.
Meredith:
Wow.
Marissa:
Getting this chemo in this clinical trial. Then I had radiation for five weeks, also in Houston. I got to come home for a month or two and then go back for surgery in Houston.
The story does have a happy ending, which I am, I mean, saying I'm grateful to the Lord to be here in 2020 just doesn't even begin to express how it feels that I have been cancer-free since 2011. I am raising teenagers and a tween girl and that I got to be there in the driveway when my 16-year-old pulled out and drove himself to school for the first time. I mean, it's just amazing to me that I am getting to be here with my kids and see these things.
But back in 2010, 2011, we didn't know how it was going to turn out. It was really challenging. My needs and my family's needs during that time were really extreme, even for someone with cancer, because I needed this clinical trial, I was living in Houston, my kids were so little, and my husband doesn't have a job where he can work from home so he needed to be at work. We just needed a lot of help.
Even though our needs were extreme, God's provision was just as extreme. Every time my husband and I would look at each other and say, "How in the world are we going to do this?" The Lord would just pull back the curtain of the plans that He had for us, to provide for us, and to care for us. And the way that He provided for us was three people. The Lord didn't just drop a pot roast from the sky. We needed dinner, right? I fully believe that He could, if He chose to provide for us by dropping a pot roast from the sky, He could do that. But that's not how He works. He works through the body of Christ, the church, other people coming around you and bringing a pot roast to your front door to provide for your dinner.
I love to talk about this topic because we have that privilege, as the body of Christ, to come alongside people who are hurting. We get to be the hands and feet of Jesus. We get to participate in the way that God is providing for people who are suffering. Sometimes it's hard to know what to do. Sometimes we worry that we're going to get it wrong, or we don't really know what our role is. I think this topic is so important, that we can just be open and upfront about the fact that this is hard, and we want to be there for people that we care about when they're hurting, but we don't always know the right way to go about it. I love having this conversation so we can work these things out together because it's challenging for all of us.
One thing, too, I wanted to mention about this topic is even though my experience is cancer, and that's what I tend to speak from that experience, I do think this is relevant to a lot of different situations. The principles that we're going to be talking about might be relevant if you have a friend who's dealing with loss or grief, or maybe she's walking through a divorce, or she's suffered a miscarriage. Really any type of suffering, you can take these same principles that we're going to talk about with the inner and outer and middle circles of friends, and apply it to a lot of different kinds of situations.
Then, I think this is important too, because sometimes when we are wanting to help our friend, and we're trying to figure out how to offer to help her, we might overestimate the closeness of our relationship. I think this is so easy to do. Because of social media, we're so connected, and we know so much about other people, so we might think we're best friends because we know what she had for breakfast yesterday. Then we offered to do something that's a little too personal, maybe a little too intimate for our relationship, and things might get awkward.
Or, on the flip side, we might say, "Well, this woman that I know from church was just diagnosed with cancer, but I've never really had a conversation with her. I don't really know her. I don't think there's anything that I can do to help." What we're going to see is that even if she doesn't know your name, you can still play an important role in her support network that God is putting together around her.
Marissa:
We're going to be talking about these three circles of friends, the inner circle, the middle circle, and the outer circle. We're going to talk about how to know which circle you're in. Then once you've identified your circle, we're going to talk about what each circle is responsible for as we're supporting someone who's going through cancer.
First of all, the circles. The inner circle, that is your small group of really close best friends. These would be people that you would socialize with on a regular basis when there's not a pandemic. Back in 2019, these are the people that you hung out with all the time, and you share personal details your life. They know about your walk with Christ. They know about your marriage or your kids or your situation that you're going through at work. They know those more personal details about you. Most of us only have just a few inner circle friends.
Then the middle circle of friends are those people that you spend time with but you maybe don't share on that same personal level as you would with an inner circle friend. Maybe your lives just overlap. You've got kids in the same grades at school and you go to church together, so you're just talking about that kind of stuff on a regular basis, but you're not necessarily pouring your heart out to each other about those deeper things. A middle circle friend can also be someone who, in a certain stage of life, was in your inner circle and then maybe you just don't bump into each other as often. When you see each other you pick right back up where you left off, but you're not talking on a regular basis anymore. Those also can be middle circle friends.
Then the outer circle are all those other friends and acquaintances that you bump into from time to time, but it wasn't necessarily on purpose. Maybe, "I'm so happy to see you when I bump into you at the gym, and we're going to chit chat about the weather or how the football team is doing, but I didn't necessarily plan to meet you at the gym and workout together, so we're outer-circle friends."
I've come up with this test. It's silly, y'all. But if you hear me describe the circles and you have someone in mind in your life, and you're trying to decide which circle you're in, I've developed this little dog test that can help you know which circle you're in. If your friend has a dog and you know the dog's name, and you've met the dog and you know what that dog does that makes your friend crazy, you are an inner circle friend. If you know the dog's name and you've met the dog, you're a middle circle friend. If you only know that she has a dog because you've seen pictures of the dog on Instagram, you are an outer circle friend.
Meredith:
I love this. This is very [inaudible] for Kaley. She has a dog. I know the dog. I know what drives Kaley crazy about the dog.
Marissa:
This means you're an inner circle friend. [crosstalk].
Kaley:
Yes. Okay. Sorry Marissa. Go ahead.
Marissa:
I'm so glad that was helpful. Now, if you hear me say that, and you realize that in a current situation you are an outer circle friend, you do not have permission to stop listening to this podcast right now, because we are going to find that the outer circle is so, so important. I could not have gotten through those nine months of treatment without my outer circle. That's something I really want our listeners to take away, is that all three of circles are important and are used by God to support someone who's hurting.
So, what does that look like? What are the responsibilities of each circle? The inner circle, I want you to think about a small circle around the inside of her home. The inner circle is responsible for things like her, the person who's going through the hard thing, her family, her home, and her heart. When I was walking through that cancer diagnosis, I was dealing with some really difficult emotions. I had a lot of fear, I was concerned for my kids and for their future, and all the uncertainty that was now a part of my life that I was not expecting to have at age 34, the changes that were happening to my body, I was losing my hair, all of those things and I needed my inner circle friends to be willing to sit and listen with me, and listen to me, and cry with me, and pray with me.
I cannot imagine how hard it must've been for them to hear some of the things that needed to come out of my mouth. But they did not shy away from those conversations. They were there for me to support me in that. But also I only needed that from just a few people. I didn't need that from everyone. I needed that from my inner circle. That emotional support piece is really important for the inner circle, along with childcare, if she has young kids. I think this probably looks different if the kids are older. But since my kids were so young, we wanted them with people that they knew really well because there was already so much upheaval in their lives. My inner circle was pretty instrumental in helping with my kids and then also cleaning my house.
One of my best friends, Jenny, she cleaned my house through that whole nine months. And honestly, you don't want just anybody cleaning your toilets. Kind of up close and personal. I think that is a job that is really great for an inner circle friend. Just thinking about her family and the inside of her home.
Then the middle circle, I want you to think about a circle that's just outside of her home. Tasks like yard work, running errands, picking up prescriptions. Maybe she needs a ride to chemo, or maybe her older kids or teens need a ride to school or to practice. Those are really great middle circle friends. I had a middle circle friend, it was the younger girl who I had mentored about a year before, so we knew each other pretty well. We weren't still meeting at the time of my diagnosis. She was probably a middle circle friend to me. She actually volunteered to drive my four-year-old, and my friend down the street's four-year-old, to preschool every Thursday morning for that whole school year. She just took over my piece of the preschool carpool. It was great. It made such a huge impact for us to know every week that that was taken care of, that she was going to show up and do that for us. That's a really great way for a middle circle friend to be involved.
Then we have the outer circle. And as I said, we could not have gotten through this without my outer circle. I think this is so important because we probably will all, at some point in our lives, be in the inner circle of someone who goes through something hard, but we will be in the outer circle over and over again. It's really important that we're clear on how we can step up and have an impact in the outer circle.
The outer circle has three main jobs. Number one is to pray. That is something that all the circles should do. But I think it's a way for the outer circle to really feel like they're making a difference and providing that prayer support. The second thing for the outer circle is to communicate support in a way that does not require a response. One way to do that would be to first pray for your friend. Don't skip that step, that's very important, and then send her a text that says you don't have to write me back. I just wanted you to know that I was praying for you in this way this morning as you start chemo next week, or whatever the situation is, whatever your prayer for her is.
Another great way to do that is to put a card in the mail. That really takes the pressure off of her to respond, and it means so much these days, but somebody found your address and a stamp and walked all the way to the mailbox. That serves as a really visible, tangible reminder of your care for her. I still have every single card that people sent me 10 years ago. I love seeing that stack of cards in my closet and remembering all of those people who loved us and prayed for us during that time. Pray, communicate support in a way that doesn't need a response, then number three is bring food.
Now, we got meals three times a week for eight months. Which, if you do the math, is more than 100 meals. There is no way that my inner circle of besties could have brought us 100 meals, especially since they were busy taking care of my kids, and cleaning my house and listening to me deal with all of my emotions. We needed this large outer circle that was committed to feeding us, and they just knocked it out of the park. They did such a great job.
One thing that was a real blessing during that time was there was a group of my husband's colleagues that all went in together and arranged a weekly pizza delivery. Every Monday night, the Pizza Hut guy rang our doorbell and handed us a large cheese and a large pepperoni pizza. Y'all, that was my kids' favorite night of the week. They loved it. So, one of those men in that group had volunteered to give me a ride to chemo, that would have awkward. I don't even know the names of the people in that group that went in together and did that. But they knew their role was to feed us. They did a great job and it really had an impact on our family for those several months that that went on. Honestly, I wish it was still going on. I'm honest. It was so great. The outer circle is so important.
Part of knowing your role in all of this, is recognizing that you can't do everything for your friend. Even if she is your lifelong bestie, you will not be doing everything for her every day. This is something that I really, really struggle with when one of my friends is hurting. Because when someone that we care about is going through something hard, we desperately want to fix it. Galatians 6:2 teaches us that we are to carry one another's burdens. We are to serve one another in love. But we won't all be called to do this the same way, and we won't be asked to do everything for our friend.
We are going to be just one link of the support network that God is building around our friend. He knows that we each have different gifts, that we have different relationships, we have different circumstances, and we can trust him to be the one to take all of those puzzle pieces and all of our offerings of support and service and sacrifice, and he's going to put them all together to meet our friend's needs. We can remember that we're just one member of the body of Christ, and that each part of the body has its own role. We're going to look at this just real briefly in 1 Corinthians 12, because I wanted to make sure that we bring God's Word in here. I don't want to just be giving practical advice if it's not grounded in what God's Word says.
In 1 Corinthians 12, right before Paul gets to the 1 Corinthians 13 talk about love, he's talking about the body of Christ, the church, all believers, and how this works. So, in 1 Corinthians 12:12, Paul says, "For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ." Paul's telling us here that he's going to compare the body of Christ with a human body and give us this analogy.
Then in 14, I'm going to read verses 14 to 18, it says, "For the body does not consist of one member, but of many. If the foot should say, 'Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,' that would not make it less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, 'Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,' that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them as he chose."
Paul is telling us here that each part of the body has a job to do, and each of those jobs is essential for the body. We can't have everyone being a nose and smelling, and then we don't have anyone who's an ear and hearing.
If you are in the outer circle, or maybe you're in the middle circle, or maybe your inner circle but you just see that another inner circle friend is taking on a role that maybe you wished was yours, we shouldn't think that we're useless because someone else is the right hand and we're the pinky toe. The pinky toe is super important. Every member of the body has a role and is needed. Don't look at the inner circle and think that you're not needed in the outer or middle circle. That would be like an ear saying it isn't needed because the body has an eye.
Then later on in this chapter, in 1 Corinthians 12, Paul says that one of the reasons that God has put together the body of Christ in this way, is so we can care for each other. In verses 25 to 27, he says that, "There may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together. If one member is honored, all rejoice together. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it."
God has sovereignly and faithfully placed you in your specific role in your friend's life. He's placed other people in her life too, with their own unique circumstances and gifts and ways that they can serve. God will be the one who's making sure that all of your friend's needs are met. He won't ask you to do everything; he'll just ask you to be faithful in the role that he's called you to. Then you can trust him to take your gifts and combine them with the gifts of everyone else around your friend. I had the privilege of seeing this 10 years ago as I watched my friends all come together, each with their own little piece, and provide for all of our needs. It was so beautiful to watch the Lord do that, to watch Him provide for every need that we had, to watch Him provide through the service and love and support of His people. It's such a privilege, for those of us in the body of Christ, when we have the opportunity to be a part of what God's doing in the lives of those that we love.
Kaley:
Wow, Marissa. That was so good and so helpful, I think on a practical level. But I think it shows how serving and loving and being the body of Christ isn't always about studying the Bible and teaching the Bible, but it's really about being friends sometimes—
Meredith:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Kaley:
—and just doing the most practical thing as a way to love others. And Marissa, I liked at the beginning how you said this isn't just an episode for people who are going through cancer, but there are other people who have gone through hard things, and we all have.
Meredith:
Absolutely.
Kaley:
I think there's this initial trauma that happens, where that inner circle of friends just appears out of nowhere, like heroes. I think about a situation that I was in earlier in May when I was in the hospital and COVID was happening, and there was a lot of trauma going on. We had friends go to the house and bring food. I had friends just clean my house because they thought, "Well, Kaley likes to come to a clean home so I'm just going to clean." Meredith, I know you and Matt came outside and sat outside the hospital with Jared, and just sat there because he couldn't come in. I think, Marissa, I would love for you, if you feel comfortable, to share some, maybe, ideas for those people who are listening right now who are in the inner circle, what ways can they specifically act in that first 24 to 48 hours of trauma that's happening.
Meredith:
It's a good question.
Kaley:
... whenever you get that diagnosis or you're going through that hard thing?
Marissa:
Yeah, I'd be happy to share. Right after I was diagnosed, I actually spent the next several hours on the phone calling, letting people know, but also on the phone with doctors, because the doctors were calling and setting up follow-up appointments for tests to see if the cancer had spread, and second opinion appointments in other cities, and all of those things were happening that afternoon. Two of my best friends, I'm blessed with several in my inner circle, but two of those friends came to my house as soon as they were able, and one of my friends, I was on the phone in my bedroom, and she just sat in my bedroom and she found a basket of clean laundry and she just started folding it. I think she didn't necessarily do that to help, she just needed something to do. She was upset as well.
But just having someone in the rain with me as I was calling family and friends and having to share this traumatic news with them, it just meant so much to me to not be alone. Then one of my other friends came over, and no one asked her to, but she knew I clearly wasn't cooking dinner that night and I had these three little kids that didn't know what was going on, and they were expecting for there to be dinner. She just started cooking spaghetti in my kitchen. I think just the way that they just showed up and they looked around and they said, "Okay. What needs to be done? I'm just going to do it." That was really huge.
Then they also would say to me in those early days, my friend Lynette said this, and I'm tearing up because this still impacts me 10 years later. I kept saying to all my friends, "I'm so sorry your friend has cancer. I'm so sorry." Because we were all in that stage of babies and toddlers and preschoolers. I knew this was going to be hard on everyone. My friend Lynette looked at me and she said basically that I wasn't the one that was—it wasn't just me that was diagnosed with cancer. We were diagnosed with cancer together. That we were, this was happening to them, and they were in it with me. I was not alone in this. They would also tell me all the time, like, “We're in it for the long haul. We're not just showing up today. We will show up every day until this is over," and none of us knew how long that would be. I think just the showing up and then just communicating, like, "I am in this with you, and I'm in this with you for however long it takes."
Meredith:
Wow. That is beautiful. What a good friend you have. [Crosstalk] I'll say, honestly, from, this is so helpful for me. I'm a very practical, pragmatic person. I struggle with, I can't tell you how many times, I am an introverted, an emotional human being. How many times I've seen friends go through stuff, where those who are in my inner circle, it's very easy for me to know what to do, because I know them. I know what they need. I know what's most helpful. But then I have these periphery friends that I'm like, "I'm your friend, but is this going to feel intrusive if all of a sudden I haven't talked to you in a month and all of a sudden I'm like sending you flowers? Are you going to feel like, 'Oh, now you talk to me?'" Those are the thoughts that go through my mind.
So, instead of doing it, oftentimes I pull back because I'm like, "I don't want them to think I'm here for the drama of what they're going through." When they're ready, we can talk again. This is so helpful for me, honestly, to have some very clear, pragmatic outlines of like, "Yeah, if they're in my middle circle, it's okay for me to be like, 'Hey, I'm going to send you DoorDash gift certificate. You use it when you're ready.' I just love you. No need to respond." You know?
Marissa:
Yeah.
Kaley:
It's really, really helpful for someone like me who doesn't have the natural intuition as to what I should do. I'm married to a man who is incredibly intuitive in this area, and is so giving all the time. And I'm always like, "How do you know what to do?"
Marissa, this is so, so helpful. Thank you for helping us unpack just the practical side of caring for people, and especially for people like me who's like, "I don't know what's appropriate in this circumstance based upon the level of [inaudible] I have with this person." Really good stuff. Really, really good.
Meredith:
Yeah. I agree. So helpful. Well, you guys, we are about to wrap up our show. For our listeners who want to learn more, you can connect with Marissa. Marissa, do you have a website that you can point people to?
Marissa:
I do. It's Marissahenley.com.
Kaley:
There you go. [Crosstalk].
Meredith:
How about that?
Kaley:
But she also wrote an entire book called Loving Your Friend Through Cancer, specifically for people who want to do that better because cancer is often a long journey.
Meredith:
That's right.
Kaley:
That's a fantastic resource, and we're going to link to it in the show notes. Also, right after we finish this podcast recording, we're going to do a quick video interview with Marissa to dive deeper into some of the stuff that we talked about today. This is specifically for our Podcast Insider list. If you aren't a podcast insider, it's absolutely free. You can sign up today at proverbs31.org/listen. At the end of every month, we'll send you an email, and part of that email includes a bonus interview. You can get access to that—
Meredith:
That's right. And it's super fun because it's a video, and not only do you get to hear Kaley and I's voices, but you get to see our faces. Which some days, I really wish we didn't do, I'll be honest, like today when my car broke down—
Kaley:
See our messy buns and our beanies.
Meredith:
It's a bun and beanie [crosstalk] in a day.
Kaley:
It is. There you go.
Meredith:
Well, many of you guys also know that Lysa TerKeurst also went through her own cancer journey, just like Kaley said at the beginning of this. We found that her book, It's Not Supposed To Be This Way, is a tremendous resource for people who are currently just wrestling through a diagnosis, a traumatic event in their life, to help them see the traumatic event through a biblical lens. I'd love for you, if you're going through that, to check out that resource.
Kaley:
Yes. Absolutely. We mentioned earlier that Marissa is connected to First 5, so we can't go without mentioning that to you guys. It's a fantastic resource and it was started in 2015. A long time ago—
Meredith:
Wow.
Kaley:
—by Proverbs 31 and Lysa TerKeurst, as a way for you to get your mind and heart focused on the truth of God's Word, and start your day in truth instead of on the Instagram or whatever else…
Meredith:
Which is such a temptation, right?
Kaley:
It is.
Meredith:
... because we want to jump right in. But one of my favorite things about this app is that it's totally free, and it is going chapter by chapter through the entire book, entire book of the Bible, but also through the entire Bible itself. It has been a huge investment for our ministry, to dive into that. Just last year, we got all the way through the Bible, which is huge. We would love, if you enjoy First Five, if you are a First 5 user listening today, we want to encourage you, if you are able, if you are able to give back to the ministry in any way financially, we would be so, so grateful. This ministry is a totally nonprofit ministry. We are funded by the generous donations of people who are utilizing our resources or who have loved ones who are utilizing our resources. If you are considering that, please just visit our website, proverbs31.org, and hit that, I think it's “Give” or “Donate,” right up at the top.
Kaley:
Yep. It is.
Meredith:
Awesome.
Kaley:
Yes. And thank you for tuning in today, guys. Thank you. If you've listened the entire year, thank you for hanging out with us all year!
Meredith:
That's right.
Kaley:
Yes. It's the end of 2020. We will see you guys again in 2021. As we always end our episodes at Proverbs 31, we believe that when you know the Truth of God's Word and live out that Truth, it changes everything. We'll see you next time.