When Tragedy Hits

What do you do when tragedy hits and there is an annual tea with one hundred and fifty woman signed up to attend and it is tomorrow? Do you cancel it? Do you go on as planned though it feels a bit insensitive to carry on as normal? What to do?

We had all learned what to do from a couple years back. There was once upon a time when just a couple days before the tea a woman who normally attends had her own share of tragedy. Jeannette Blank woke up early in the morning to find her husband unconscious. For twenty minutes she did CPR on her him and kept him alive till the paramedics were able to take over. He had suffered from a brain stem stroke. Few survive this kind of stroke.

We on the committee were confused then as to what to do with the tea. Someone brought to our attention the opportunity that it provided. The opportunity to gather in one place and with one voice cry out to the only Physician who could perform a miracle. It was decided, the tea must go on. And it did.

I had spent the day of the tea preparing a mini tea for Jeannette and her sister, Sherilyn, a close friend of mine. We wanted them to have their own tea in the waiting room. An antique shop in town provided pretty teacups and we packaged up the tasty tea food and sent it down to Philadelphia. There was sweet spirit that night of the tea. I will never forget how electrifying the air felt as we prayed collectively with one voice asking for one request, "Heal Ivan, Lord."

Ivan was healed, miraculously. Today he works, is a father to his children, and husband to his wife, and has an amazing testimony. He went to sleep a carpenter and woke up a preacher. There is a sweetness about him, an unearthly sense that is refreshing.

From our experience with Ivan and Jeannette we knew what we were to do.