S4E12: Helping Well: The Healing Power of Presence, Perspective, and Prayer Artwork

Didn't Ask to be a Hero Podcast: Ordinary Women Living Extraordinary Lives

The Didn’t Ask to be a Hero Podcast strives to share the stories of ordinary women who have overcome challenges and are now walking in the truth of God’s love, freedom, and victory! These stories celebrate the unsung sheroes who, due to unexpected circumstances, have grown in faith and are shining more brightly in the light of God’s story for their lives. These stories remind us of the familiar and the completely foreign, bringing women together across the divides of the unknown and the different. Ultimately The Didn’t Ask to be a Hero Podcast is giving voice to women who may not always be heard, with the intent of transforming other women’s stories as we transform our families and communities one story at a time.For more information, please visit our website at www.mazuriministries.org

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Didn't Ask to be a Hero Podcast: Ordinary Women Living Extraordinary Lives

S4E12: Helping Well: The Healing Power of Presence, Perspective, and Prayer

August 29, 2025 • Season 4 • Episode 12

Cancer Sucks, Jesus Saves is a six-part podcast series that tackles the raw reality of cancer while shining a light on unshakable hope in Christ. In today's final episode of Cancer Sucks, Jesus Saves, we speak with licensed therapist, Weena Wise, who specializes in walking with individuals and families through serious illness. She shares practical, compassionate advice on how to truly support someone facing cancer—not with clichés or quick fixes, but with presence, empathy, and faith.

We explore the emotional toll illness takes on both the patient and their circle, the importance of self-care for caregivers, and how our thoughts, beliefs, and spiritual practices can either hinder or help the healing journey. With wisdom and grace, she reminds us that healing isn’t just physical—it’s emotional, mental, and deeply spiritual.

Whether you’re fighting cancer or walking beside someone who is, this episode offers encouragement and tools to show up with love, care for your own heart, and lean into the hope only Jesus can give.

Because support heals, faith restores, and love never fails—even when cancer tries to.

Thank you for joining us along this journey. We pray that this series and these voices serve to remind you that while cancer is devastating, it doesn’t have the final say.

And as always, Annie and I would love to hear from you. Have you or a loved one been impacted by cancer or another illness? How are you coping? How can we pray for you? Please email us at mazuri@mazuriministries.org, or share your story with us on IG @davenialeawrites, or on FB @annieraney

And if you know someone who might benefit from this series, please share it with them. Your share might just be the hope they need!

Finally, your reviews mean the world to us, and they also assist us in spreading God's message of hope and victory across the globe! So please leave us a review on your favorite podcast player or on our Podcast Webpage

🔗 Again, don’t forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review to keep the conversation going!

Today's episode songs are (yes, you're getting two for the final time)Hold On by Le'Andria Johnson and The Hand that Keeps Holding Me by Tasha Cobbs Leonard. Please note these songs are for your listening enjoyment only and cannot be downloaded or shared.

Thanks for listening! From our hearts to yours!!

Send us a text. We'd love to connect with you!

Annie: Welcome to the Didn't Ask to Be a Hero podcast. I'm your host, Annie Raney. In each episode we will get an opportunity to see how ordinary women are now living amazing, abundant and extraordinary lives with God's help.

May their stories serve to encourage and inspire you. Let's get started.

Hi listeners.

Today is going to be a very, very special episode. So I'm so glad you joined us.

As you know, this summer we've been doing a series on that terrible, horrible, no good, very, very bad, that big gigantic C word cancer that unfortunately has dominated so many lives around the world.

And I want to draw your attention to Proverbs 17:22, where it says,

a merry heart doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones.

And so what we want to talk about is no matter how you are connected to cancer,

how do we deal with the impact on our emotions and perhaps our mental health and even our spiritual health?

So Divinia had a brilliant idea to bring in someone special to help bring this cancer series to a close. But to leave you perhaps with,

I don't know, a little bit of medicine to help you through whatever you're going through and to help answer some of the questions that we have and that you might have.

But I'm going to throw it to Divinia and her Introduce our special guest today.

Davenia: Hi.

So glad to be here for our final episode of this series and it is my extreme pleasure to introduce our guest today.

Actually,

she has been a guest.

She was in served in the capacity of sharing her insights and her experience regarding life after divorce.

If you haven't heard that episode, please go take a listen. I think it's Christian Girl's Guide to Divorce. And in that episode she shared her background as being a therapist counselor.

But I also know her personally as a friend and can't tell you how many free hours I've received on the virtual couch with Wena. And so today Wena Wise will be sharing with us just how do we process and make sense of maybe the emotions and how do we actualize some of the,

the things that previous guests have shared, Things like self care and, and praying and having faith.

What does that actually look like? And so welcome Lena.

Weena: Thank you so much for such a generous introduction. I'm so happy to be back with you, Annie, and you, Davina.

Annie: Lena, can you just tell us just, I mean like some listeners are familiar with you, but just give a really quick 30 second brief as to who you are and what you do.

Davenia: Sure.

Weena: I'm WENA wise. And I'm a licensed clinical marriage and family therapist.

I'm also a clinical writer and a certified professional coach.

I have over 20 years of experience in the field and I did the math.

So I have sat in over 20,000 sessions in the last 20 years.

Individuals, couples who are definitely my favorite, and families who are going through an array of concerns, whether it's life transitions like cancer, job loss,

parent, child issues,

infidelity, communication breakdowns, depression, anxiety,

you name it, I have heard it. So in the D.C. metropolitan area, I am kindly referred to as everyone's professional best friend. PB.

Davenia: Well, we're gonna jump right in. And. And before we do, I. I want to.

So our last episode should have would have been an episode where we were going to sit down and have a conversation with a young lady who had recently been diagnosed with cancer and she was going to share her journey.

And she was so excited. We were.

And between the setting up the interview and actually having it, she died. And I know personally how that hit.

Like,

you know,

hey,

but we been doing this series and there are people who are doing research on cancer and,

and we've been praying, praying without ceasing. And so many people were praying.

And so I guess my first question is,

how do you reconcile all of those emotions? Those emotions of I have faith, yet this person died, I prayed, yet this person died,

or this person is still sick, or it just seems like my prayers are going unanswered. How would you counsel us to deal with those emotions?

Weena: Let me say here first that though I deal with this from a clinical perspective, I also have a lot of personal perspective about it as well.

My father died from blood cancer.

My mother is a cancer survivor and is currently waiting to hear about a second cancer diagnosis.

My grandmother died from throat cancer and my great aunt died from brain cancer.

So when I say that cancer is all around us,

it is absolutely all around us. And clearly I have had some experience with those very moments where you pray and you are expecting your faith to deliver.

And sometimes it doesn't.

So how we reconcile that is through understanding that even that process of processing when our faith doesn't deliver is a marathon and it's not a sprint.

It's this open ended journey where the mind continues to usually circle back and forth around how it happened because the mind lacks closure.

It wants to be able to close a thing and say this happened because of X or it happened because of Y. And that gives us a sense of security.

But the truth is that we're not going to have a sense of security when we're dealing with the omnipresent, omnipotent God, because his ways are not our ways and his thoughts are not our thoughts.

And we have to constantly remember that. That there's a bigger plan in place.

And if we don't accept that and we make it very much about our loved one and our experience with the process, then we can become really angry,

deeply angry that God or our faith didn't do what we thought it should do.

Annie: I. I want to ask you,

Wena, I've always had this question you.

So,

like,

clinically, I've heard of, like, clinical depression. That term is, like, out there, right? But you know, clinically, I think, okay, they're seeing. They're seeing somebody, some professional, and they're getting treatment, perhaps medication, therapy, whatever it is.

What's the difference between that and someone who doesn't have a clinical depression diagnosis, but they get cancer diagnosis and then they get.

They get. They would be depressed. What might that look like? And how do you fight that?

Weena: Oh, gosh, this is such a wonderful question. And I get it all the time. Because grief and depression are close cousins,

their symptoms mirror each other almost to a T.

So the grieving process may include loss of concentration,

loss of interest in the things that used to bring you joy,

sleep, being impacted. You're either popping up in the middle of the night and can't stay down, and you can't get down.

Appetite loss or increase. You might find yourself comfort eating.

You may not desire sex anymore.

You may withdraw from others in ways that you normally wouldn't.

And you may be sad every day or almost every day for a long period of time.

And you may have dark thoughts.

Those are all the criteria for depression,

but they're also all of the symptoms of grief.

Grief is a temporary,

sometimes temporary state, but it's also a normal state that occurs when we lose something or something changes about life.

So it's not just about loss. It's about a huge shift that potentially causes some people to not be able to really step up to that shift and just go with the flow.

And of course, if you have cancer, that's a shift that may cause you to be in a state of paralysis for a period of time.

How a person would diagnose that is through listening.

It takes more than one session. It takes understanding the backstory, understanding if there is a situation that's causing grief,

and being able to delineate between whether or not this is really a situation.

There is situational depression or a chemical issue. That's causing the depression. Because there are two different kinds of depression.

Or if this is solely grief. Wow. Yeah.

Annie: I had a friend who was. Who got diagnosed, but they were so angry. So, like,

almost to the point where every time I speak with them, they're complaining because.

But what can you say to someone like that? Because you don't want to totally say, get over it. But there's something more to it. But I don't know, a regular person like me,

they're just calling me as a friend. What. What can we do to help them through that?

Weena: Believe it or not, that sounds like a fear of not having control of the unknown. Beneath that anger is the realization that something bad can happen to us and it's above our pay grade sometimes to know how to fix it.

But there's also this really deep fear about what if this happens again?

Or it shifts my life again in a way that I can't control.

Now, that isn't always discoverable to a friend who's just trying to be there and support. But as a clinician,

these are some of the things that we would immediately tap into underneath a person's anger. Because anger is typically a secondary or tertiary emotion.

There's usually a softer emotion beneath the anger.

Davenia: So the emotions are real. Right. So, yes, we do feel anger, fear, anxiety. But what are some healthy ways for us to process those emotions?

Weena: You may have heard of some of these strategies before,

but things like journaling are really helpful because not only does it give you an outlet where you can get out some of the emotions, both positive and negative,

but it also gives you a timeline and a record of what was happening in real time.

And I find that one of the biggest benefits of journaling is that you get to look back six months later, two years later, seven years later,

and see what's the same and what's different about where you are. And that in itself becomes a living epistle. Another thing that I like to do personally and instruct my clients to do is get a little mason jar or a box.

And whenever you hear a testimony,

a miracle,

or something positive happening, particularly when you're in a negative emotional state,

you simply write the date and you write a little short paragraph about the miracle, the testimony,

and you fold it up really small and you pop it in that box or that mason jar.

And on your worst days,

when the sky is falling,

nothing is going right, and you feel like the end is near, you get your box of your mason jar and you dig your hand in it, and you just pull out a Random strip of paper, and you open it up and it says,

August 19, September 25,

this great thing happened to me or it happened to another person.

And it just gives you a tiny bit of perspective that everything in the world is not always bad. Exercising is so important at a time when you're paralyzed and you feel those negative emotions.

Of course, it's a great way to get the endorphins up, but it's also a good way to stop yourself from stress eating,

which is something that in this country we do a lot when we feel like we can't control other things. Sometimes we give ourselves a quick hit of comfort by eating food, and then that leads to other health challenges.

And so exercise is always a great way to combat some of that and also tire yourself out so that you can sleep. Because sleep is also one of the enemies when we feel negative emotions.

Believe it or not,

anger can be a sedative. For some people,

when they become angry, they get so worked up and their nervous system gets so activated that they fall asleep or they sleep for long periods of time because that's the only way they can control their emotions.

And so you want to monitor your sleeping. We want healthy sleep versus angry sedative sleep. And it does happen from time to time.

Then last thing I'll say is art and inspirational music.

You two do a great job on the podcast of always asking, do you have an inspirational stuff song?

And there was one song, I think it was on the first episode of this series, that was so amazing. I think the words hold on were in the song.

It was. It's so good. But music has a way of moving the spirit in both directions. So we want to find music that speaks to us and lifts us up and puts us in a space of calmness and peace if we're going through something emotional.

And it really does happen that you can create a ritual of incorporating music either at the beginning or the end of a day that will help you to shift your mood and shift your thinking so that you can get out of that negative state, at least temporarily.

Davenia: Wow.

Annie: You know, that song is Lauren Daigle's hold on to Me.

And at my sister's funeral,

she passed away in May of 2024 from cancer and a whole lot of other stuff. But anyways, my two nieces and my son sang that at her funeral.

And my niece said before,

which I love sometimes from the mouth of babes, right? She said, we really miss Auntie Lizzie. We used to love playing with her.

And she said the song we're Going to sing is called hold on to Me. And during this time that we're missing Auntie Lizzie, we're just asking God to hold on to all of us.

Weena: And I was like that.

Annie: That got me the way that won me over with those words. So now when I hear that song, it. Yes, it makes me think of my, you know, sadness, but it also brings me comfort in knowing, you know, that I'm asking God to hold on to me.

But I want to ask you a question. We know patients and caregivers,

they sometimes,

you know, especially caregivers. We talked to Divinia. What was her name? AKA what was her.

Davenia: Oh, Sharon. Sharon, Sharon.

Annie: She was phenomenal taking care of her husband. Still taking care of her husband as he's, you know, has gone through and is going through different treatments with cancer.

And she even said something in relation to this question I'm gonna ask you, and that is about caregivers,

friends.

Sometimes we don't know how to take care of others and ourselves. But how do you do that? Because as a caregiver, you don't. You. You're sitting here like, oh, my goodness, this person is going through so much pain and suffering, and they have the cancer.

So can I stop? I have to keep going. So what are some. Some suggestions, Weena, that you have for caregivers and patients or anybody?

How can they set boundaries? How do you do that in a way that doesn't offend somebody or hurt somebody?

Weena: A drowning man can't save another soul.

Davenia: Wow, that's deep.

Annie: Okay, tell us more.

Weena: So simple. You know, you hear the airplane reference a lot, where you have to secure your own map.

Davenia: Yeah.

Weena: Secure others.

And it's so true that if you go like a robot,

without care for the long haul, you will burn out and ultimately not reach the goal, which is to not only see the cancer patient through,

but to also be there to enjoy it.

So when we don't take care of ourselves in the process,

it not only threatens the goal,

which is to be of service to the cancer patient,

but it also threatens us.

Annie: Yeah, but how do you tell somebody? Let's say somebody's a caregiver. Let's say I'm just gonna use myself. Let's say my husband is taking care of me and I'm very ill and all of that, and I only want him.

But that's not fair to him if 24 7,

you know, he needs a break. How does he do that knowing that I only want him to help me get up, dress up, go to the bath, whatever it is.

He needs a break. So how. And somebody might be going through that themselves. So, you know, what. What do they do?

Weena: You know, there's a rational and irrational part of each of us.

And the people closest to us are usually our mirrors.

They mirror the beautiful parts of us and the ugly parts of us and the parts of us that can become very scared,

needy,

selfish,

are the parts that the loved ones closest to you have to battle the most.

So it's good that you bring that up, Annie, because for those who are adjacent to cancer patients, and for cancer patients as well,

we need to say right here that the battle is a marathon and it's not a sprint.

And the way it looks every day is sometimes pretty tedious.

And it's not always a beautiful journey just because the person who cares for you loves you.

Loving a person means that sometimes you have to tell them the truth about themselves. And when you're a pill as a patient and you sometimes try to pull people so close that they can't get their own mask on before they get yours on,

you endanger the whole process.

And you get to say that as a caregiver,

you get to say,

a drowning man can't save another soul. If you take me down with you,

then neither one of us are going to survive this.

How does that feel?

Davenia: Well, I think.

See, and this will get into a whole other areas.

So if you're a caregiver, but you're also a people pleaser,

or if you're dealing with some, maybe you have some guilt going on or whatever else.

So then I think the whole topic of setting boundaries is hard, but I like what you said.

You know, maybe it's that we have to change our perspective of what it means to love someone.

Because I think a lot of times we. We think, well, if I love them, then that means I'm going to give them everything they want.

I'm going to meet their every need.

But maybe that's not loving them at all. So. So then if I switch that perspective of what it means to love,

then I know for me personally, then I. I stop and ask myself, well, is that really loving them in a helpful way?

If I give them what they're asking for, is that really helping them or loving them?

Weena: The B word boundaries is not overused, but it gets a negative connotation a lot.

And I didn't use the word per se here because I like to think of it as telling the truth in love,

and the person that you left out was yourself.

If we're telling truth in love. Then we also have to look in the mirror every morning before we show up to give care to another person and say, see if we've loved ourself first.

Have I taken care of my most basic needs?

Have I secured my own employment today? Or am I about to get fired because I keep taking off work and nobody else is being delegated to to help this person?

Am I going to survive this week, this month, or this year if I keep going at this pace?

We have to tell the truth to ourself as well.

Versus just focusing on the patient at the moment.

Don't secure our own mask. If we don't check in with ourselves every day as a ritual,

then we will become beholden to that person's needs,

their wants. And it is a journey of seasons.

What you feel and what you need at the start of the cancer journey. It just evolves over time,

through getting the diagnosis, to going through the treatment, to then post treatment.

The way you felt about it during one part can be different, and what you need from the people around you can be different.

And it can be different every day or every week, not just this three month period to this three month period and then how I felt a year later.

There has to be some understanding that the process throws curveballs and you can't always stay ahead of your feelings and your needs.

And therefore, there has to be a lot of flexibility within the entire community of people who are trying to be close,

trying to provide care and the patient.

Davenia: Yeah. I love the way you said that.

Annie: That was like. I like the fact that you said it changes. It's not like, okay, I need you to be there for me 24 7. And that's how it's gonna be for the next year.

Davenia: Yeah.

Weena: It's not linear in any way. And neither are the five stages of grief.

It's not that you go through denial first, and then you get to anger, and then you go through depression, and then you go through acceptance.

Those are flexible as well in that you may revisit anger,

or you may revisit denial,

or you may feel like you accepted it today, and then a week later, you're in a completely different space with it.

So it takes time and understanding to realize just how much of a moving target treating cancer is and dealing with it and being adjacent to it can be.

Annie: You know, Rena, you're so good with.

I don't know the words to me come to describe you. Calm, cool, collective. I don't know. But so I want to ask you this. So you. You Said some amazing things that could help somebody listening right now.

But I'd like to go a step further if you could. Putting you on the spot here, but you're so good with this.

What are some gentle statements or starter statements that either a patient or a caregiver or friend could give in those moments where,

you know, they kind of need a break? They won't just say, listen, I'm tired,

okay?

I need, I need some time away from you. We don't want to say it like that.

What are some other ways that people might be able to start those conversations in a gentle way?

Weena: Rituals are helpful.

If you start a thing the way you want it to end, it usually goes smoothly.

However,

that doesn't always happen.

But I bring up rituals because at the start of a journey, if you're going to be supporting a person who may be going through a life threatening illness of any kind,

it would be nice to say,

how can we both get what we need today?

As soon as you enter the space with them, if you're on the phone or you know, you're starting a day of caregiving or a visit at the hospital,

how are you doing? Oh, that's how you're feeling? Great. This is how I'm feeling today.

We never think to then follow up and say, well, let me tell you how I'm feeling. I'm asking you how you're feeling, but I also need to prep you to my mood and my attitude today.

And then how can both of us get what we need today?

It's a very compromising statement that that gets both of your brains working.

We're going to put our needs on the table and we're also going to put some of the deficits on the table. If somebody's tired or sleep deprived, if somebody's hungry and hasn't eaten, if someone's in more pain or both people are in different kinds of pain.

I can help you to this extent, but I'm also going to need to take a break.

Davenia: I love that because I think a lot of times as a caregiver we want to take on all the responsibility.

And sometimes maybe what that does is then, then we take agency away from the person who we're caring for. But doing what you just said then is saying to them, no, we're in this together.

And that you're still my spouse or my friend or my parent. You're not just patient,

you know.

Weena: Yeah,

that was so astute.

Especially since some patients don't want to be reduced to one dimension.

Life is still Happening to us and around us. And even when we get a cancer diagnosis,

life doesn't typically give us the grace to slow down.

We're still juggling multiple balls and wearing lots of hats.

And then we also still want to be useful and purposeful.

So I might be in a little pain today, or I might need you to change a dressing, or I might need you to help me with something,

but I can still listen.

I'm so bored of talking about cancer all the time. Please tell me what's going on in your life.

Please give me something that I can do to take my mind off of today. Because today is a hard surgery or it's a hard procedure,

and we do underestimate that level of collaboration that can happen.

But also,

I believe that intimacy occurs when two people are able to be vulnerable at the same time.

And so you might have cancer, and we may be battling your cancer together.

But I also have some things going on, and I need the space to be vulnerable at the same time.

And when two people can actually trust that they can share that space,

there's nothing more beautiful than that that one person's world doesn't have to stop. You don't have to hold your breath the entire time someone is going through this season or this battle with cancer.

It just makes the relationship stronger when you can do that.

Is it something that people get to easily?

Not necessarily,

but often it's because we don't really dare to try.

We know to give the person more agency and responsibility when they're going through something hard.

So that's something that I would challenge people to think about.

And we all have people in our lives that have to be centered when they are ill, and they may not have capacity or bandwidth to take on some of our things.

But when you're in a marriage or you're. You're actually adjacent to a sibling or a friend who's going through it,

it's a possibility that there's room there to negotiate so that both of you can get your needs met. Not every day, but some days.

Davenia: And we've talked a lot about the maybe more practical sides of dealing with our emotions and our mental health and well being. What about spiritual care?

Weena: I think one of the most important things as a cancer patient to do is to guard your spirit and really make sure you're watching what you let in. And that's different for everyone.

I like to say here that, you know, we walk this fine line here, but sometimes when people are really spiritual or deeply religious,

they don't allow space for anger, for negativity, for grief, for. For sadness and for guilt,

the patient and themselves with this toxic positivity that doesn't really leave room for the reality.

The reality is that this treatment may not work. The reality is that I'm in so much pain today that I don't feel like smiling. I don't feel like listening to inspirational music.

I don't feel like being my one woman, one man pet band and being able to tune into yourself as a patient or your loved one and hear when they need to have that space.

To be honest and sometimes negative and just be,

listen and hold it versus covering over it with so much positivity that they can't be authentic is a really valuable thing and a necessary thing to do.

Davenia: I love that. I do.

And,

and I think that's also biblical, right? Because God says,

cast all your cares on me. So He, he, he doesn't want us to show up with this fake smile on all the time saying everything is okay. No, he's bring me your anger, bring me your sadness, your hurt, bring me your doubt and your questions because he's big enough to handle it.

And you're right. I think a lot of times we've equated being spiritual or being faithful as being always positive and never having problems and never being vulnerable.

I think that's counter what God really wants.

He wants our authentic, genuine selves with all the mess, all the questions, all the everything.

Weena: So when I say guard what you let into your spirit,

not just the negativity. I do believe that more survivors do flood themselves with optimism and hope and it does get them through.

But you also have to guard against being around people who don't make space for you to be honest.

And when it's exhausting to have someone constantly combating the things that you're feeling or even causing you to question.

Should I feel guilty because I'm not having a good day? Should I feel bad because this person is just going hard for.

Don't think about death, don't think about the pain. Just push through. And I don't have that attitude right now. And I'm the patient.

You got to guard against spending so much time with people who cause your spirit to be really negatively impacted.

Davenia: Well, think about Job, right?

Who is God angry with?

The three friends, right?

Who?

But they thought they were doing good. I think they came from a genuine place of concern,

but it was misplaced. Right. And so, yeah, I think we have to also guard ourselves when we're talking to someone who's going through, through whatever it is and make sure we're not causing that person to doubt or question because a lot of times you'll hear,

well, you just need to pray more. Well, you just have to have greater faith.

And again, that's not of God, you know,

and so we have to be careful lest we be like Job's friends.

Weena: Well, that's getting into people who subscribe to really legalistic or black and white thinking.

And again, we're guarding our spirit against people whose beliefs are not in alignment with ours. And you have to figure out, does this person walk their faith walk the way I walk mine?

And that becomes critical in moments when we're facing a life threatening illness because again, the slightest thing can trigger you into feelings of guilt, anger.

And we don't need more of that because it's taking almost all the bandwidth we have to deal with what's happening in our body.

Davenia: Yeah.

Yeah.

Well,

this has been so incredible and enlightening and the perfect way to end this series.

And in fact, I'm thinking we shouldn't just let this be the end. And so we are excited that listeners,

you're going to get more of we know wise.

And beginning in September,

we'll have her on monthly so that we can continue to hear those stories of these unexpected and unsung heroes.

But then we'll have more discussions on how do you actually live the hero life. And so I'm excited and we're looking forward to what that looks like. But before we go,

because we always end this way, is there a particular song that's on your playlist right now that's motivating you?

Weena: There is a praise and worship song that I thought about when Annie and I were discussing that song, hold on to Me.

And the song is actually entitled hold on,

but it is by a different artist,

Leandria Johnson. Hold On.

Davenia: All right,

all right. Well, that seems to be the theme of this series. No matter what you're going through, we just gotta hold on and keep the faith. And so,

again, this has been so wonderful.

Annie,

you thinking over there?

Annie: I am thinking, wow.

So I learned a lot from wena and sometimes she just worded things that I've already thought about but never seemed to be able to put into words. And then sometimes she said things that I'm like, wow, I never heard of it that way.

It was just amazing. We know we can't thank you enough. What a great way to end this series because while there is nothing positive about cancer and as,

as we've discussed today and I'm going to pull some things that Weena said.

You know, you have to take in mind that a merry heart doth well. Right.

You have to take care of yourself,

too. And a drowning man can't save another soul is what we said.

Weena: Right?

Annie: So how do you do that in a loving way? Ask each other, as we said,

how can we both get what we need today?

And that opens the door to a gentle conversation.

And Matthew 11:28 says, Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

We have to take that time to. To get rest.

And God is there for us sometimes. A lot of times God sends people like Weena or a family member or a friend to help you get that rest.

But you have to take it upon yourself to accept that you need some rest.

And whatever you're going through, my friends, it may be really, really tough.

It may be really tough. Maybe you just are watching somebody go through cancer or lost someone.

As we know, Divinia mentioned, Kia was supposed to be our guest. We had her scheduled. The zoom link was already ready. And then Divinia texts me and says,

she passed away.

And maybe you're experiencing that, too. We want to dedicate this episode in this series to Kia and all the others who lost a loved one to cancer and who knows, somebody who has survived cancer.

But here's how I want to end it. Hold on, my friends, no matter what you're going through,

because cancer may look like it won the battle against Kia, but Kia actually won the war because she allowed God to fight it for her.

And she is going to be healed again when we see her, when Jesus comes again.

So all you have to do, my friends,

is take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and hold on.

So from our hearts to yours, this song's for you.

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Annie: Welcome to the Didn't Ask to Be a Hero podcast.

I'm your host, Annie Raney. In each episode we will get an opportunity to see how ordinary women are now living amazing, abundant and extraordinary lives with God's help.