Letters help Samaritan Ministries member through difficult time

When Samaritan Ministries members send encouraging notes to other members along with their monthly shares, they’re helping them through a difficult time emotionally and spiritually.

Sixty-year-old Cheri’s dining room, where the walls are covered with notes, is proof of that.

Cheri, who joined Samaritan Ministries with her husband, Ron, in December 2013, is living with lung cancer, which was diagnosed this past summer. She’s trusting God to either heal her or take her home, foregoing chemotherapy and radiation treatment after seeing the impact of those approaches on loved ones in the past.

But even in her hour of suffering, Cheri has found reasons to rejoice as she has received encouraging cards and notes from Samaritan members sending shares for hospital bills that she incurred as doctors discovered the cancer this past year.

“It’s not the money,” she says, her voice breaking. “It’s just the ‘We’re thinking of you,’ ‘We’re praying for you.’ That means the world to me. I have like 48 cards taped up all over in my dining room. All I have to do is look at a card and say, ‘They’re thinking of me. They’re praying for me.’”

Ron confirms how much the notes mean to his wife.

“When she opens the envelopes that have come from across the country, she sets aside the check and if they have included a note she begins to cry,” he says. “I would ask that you ask people to make sure they send the notes as she is so moved by some of the notes of encouragement that her spirits are just lifted and she forgets, at least for a moment, that she has cancer.”

Cheri is not without hope.

“Maybe God will perform a miracle,” she says. “But the miracle to me is just knowing that people care and that they’re praying for you. I feel so encouraged by that, and it makes me feel so loved. I don’t even know these people and yet they’re praying for me.”

She has asked for continued prayer for her to feel God’s presence “and to know He’s caring for me.”

“I love the Lord and I know He loves me and I want to do as much as I can for Him while I’m here,” she says.