WHAT OCCUPIES YOUR HEART
I squirmed a bit as I forced myself to listen to my friend cataloging her problems. After three hours, I interrupted her gently to ask, "If you were to draw a circle to represent your life, what would be in the center?
She thought a moment, then said, "My problems." My friend spoke the truth.
A week later, I sat across the hospital bed on which lay my younger sister, Joye, who had just been diagnosed with acute leukemia. Gray and perspiring, with a swath of bandages encasing her throat from a biopsy, Joye talked to a student nurse who was interviewing terminally ill people to see if there was any way she could help them.
"Oh, Jan, I'm a bit fearful of the pain and process of dying--but I'm not afraid of death! It'll just be a change of residence for me," I heard my sister, her face radiant from within, say to this student nurse. And for forty-five minutes, Joye explained the good news of Jesus Christ to Jan.
Afterward, I thought, Both my friend and sister have serious problems. Yet one's walking I despair, and the other in joy. What makes the difference?
Then I realized what it was. My friend's heart was occupied with her problems; my sister's heart was occupied with the Living God.
(Carole Mayhall, Today's Christian Woman, Vol. 20, no. 2.)