Faith Was The One Thing She Needed Most

 

I received my Giving Key for Christmas during my freshmen year of college. I saw the keys on an Instagram page, absolutely fell in love and immediately put it on my wish list. That was it. I wanted it because it was cute. I mean, I thought it was cool how you give it to someone who needs to message, but I didn't think I would find myself in a situation where giving my key away would mean something. Until the summer of 2014.

I have never been greatly affected by tragedy throughout my 19 years of life. I'm a daughter to two happily married parents, a niece to three cancer survivors, and am grateful to consider myself an extremely lucky girl. Lucky that in June of 2014 I just wished I could give away because I didn't need it and someone else did. That month my best friend told me her mom had been diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. News that affected me as if it were my own family, because from the moment we had become friends her family had treated me as if that were true.

As summer went on and my best friend's life started to revolve more and more around chemo when it should have been spent enjoying her last summer before she went off to college it hit me. She was the someone. The someone who needed the message infinitely more than I did.

I went to her house the night before she left for her first year on her own with a letter in one hand and a box in the other, preparing myself for what was going to turn into so much more than an already emotional goodbye. In the letter I said all the things I knew I would never be able to convey to her in a conversation and assured her that faith was the one thing she needed most of all to keep. I wanted this key to serve as a reminder that faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

Now, 8 months later, I have no doubt in my mind that this key was given to me for a purpose. Two weeks ago, my friend's mother finished her last cancer treatment -- because even when there was no reason to have faith and believe, nobody stopped.

 

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