It was three weeks from diagnosis when one of my worst fears came to reality.  Dad couldn’t move.

His cancer ravaged body simply could not work in harmony enough to allow his legs to hold him upright.  He couldn’t walk nor stand.  He was stuck, a 200 pound stone leaning against my legs, perched at the top of the stairs.  I was completely and utterly powerless.

Our Saint of an oncologist agreed, via text, that calling an ambulance was a good idea.  They navigated him from the chair in which he was slumped, onto the litter and into the truck.

Dad waved at my boys who ran alongside the rig as we pulled up the road.  I, clutching the official ‘medical binder’, sat in the front seat.  I dialed over and over again my friend.  Rarely does she actually answer her phone, yet I kept dialing.  For the one thing I could control, maybe, was where my sons would go in the midst of this bewildering and heart stopping turn of events.  There was no response.

As we sat at a red light, I glanced to my right.  My friend, whom I had given up calling, was walking down the street, leaving a fundraiser.  I rolled down the window and barely asked, “Can you take the boys?”  Without hesitation, she and her husband answered, “Yes.”

My friend called her teenage son to let him know two hungry little boys would suddenly be spending the night.  He said, “Good thing I bought 10 t.v. dinners!”  Our manna didn’t fall like so many yeasty flakes to the ground.  Rather it filled the shopping cart of a teenage boy and the microwave oven.

In our future there will be more ambulances and events over which I will have no control.  I am thankful there will also be more sidewalk miracles and microwaveable manna.