Banner People

We will shout for joy when you are victorious and will lift up our banners in the name of our God. Psalm 20:5

Our friend, Fos, is a banner that waves high and marks the spot, “When you are faced with your mortality, here is where you come.”  He is in the midst of his second campaign against cancer in two-and-a-half years.  He was the one who started me thinking about banners.  I linked the other words with it, he didn’t.  He’s too humble to do that.  But those of us who see his standard waving, know the truth.  We read his honest, straight-forward and faith-filled blog and he inspires and encourages us in our “mole-hill” challenges.

I then thought of other banners I’ve had in my life.  Most of these I’ve gotten just a fleeting glimpse of as I marched through my own life.  I think of them as standards on the battlefield that let us know that our commander is very close by.  If we are in trouble we move closer to the standard.  We can follow the standard to the place of safe refuge. 

I recall a banner from thirty-some years ago.  A couple shared their story and their vision for a new venture.  They had owned a construction company and when hit with the current recession had either closed up shop or sold the business.  They were now in foreign missions construction.  What caught my attention the most was the knowing look that transmitted between them as they talked of a loss that led them into something more marvelous that they could have imagined.  I saw that look and sighed, “Oh how awful to lose what you have worked for.”  We were just emerging from a struggling phase of a fledgling business.  I was finally wearing stylish clothes and getting decent haircuts because there was finally money to do that.  I couldn’t imagine having that grateful look if it all went by the wayside.  But their standard was waving, “If you have to let go of something to grasp onto something better, have no fear.”

I met Renee last fall and was immediately struck with her lovely and warm countenance.  She showed interest and support of our celebration she was attending by asking questions, complimenting the surroundings and personalities.  It was much later in the day when I heard someone mention the tragic death of Renee’s daughter.  Her reply was, “Even when you experience great loss, God is good to teach you through it.”  At that moment she raised a banner for me. It signified, “When your heart has broken, if you let the Savior bind up your wounds, this is what you can look like.”

    

Dave and Shirley have only known frugality and generosity in their material lives.  The money that has gone through their hands to worthwhile causes and needy individuals that coincidentally cross their path at gas stations and grocery stores is more than the income of even affluent people.  They certainly did not deserve to be victims of a Ponzi scheme.  I can remember Dave and Shirley beamed when they first made their investment.  They told us the man they invested with said, “Your investment (nearly a million dollars) has taken us to a new level where my wife can now stay home with our children.”  Dave and Shirley’s hearts are as good as gold.  Later when the scheme was reveal, that gold was polished before my very eyes when Dave and Shirley raised a standard that shouted, “When you have been taken advantage of, forgiveness is the only sure route away from bitterness and into peace.”

After a battery of tests, Janet’s doctor informed her she had a rare brain cancer and had seven weeks to live.  The medical center shook as Janet raised her banner. “Well, praise the Lord,” she said as she maneuvered it into place.  Many people, well and sick, rallied around that standard as Janet moved through her treatment, therapy and restoration.  Now two years later that standard declares, “If you have an impossible situation, remember nothing is impossible with God.”

At a fall bazaar I was manning an inactive craft table so I was free to listen in on my friend’s conversation with a woman she had known several years before in her church.  I never caught the name of the pixyish lady dressed stylishly in black and donning a velvet hat with the brim turned up off her very pleasant face.  I listened because the conversation was so uplifting. I didn’t hear a negative word from her, but I learned through my eavesdropping, that her marriage of forty plus years fell apart, she now lived in a senior residence that I think was government subsidized and she had sold her car because it cost too much to maintain.  The woman who bought it asked her to drive her around in it.  They were together at the bazaar. Her story intrigued me because it was so dissonant from what I was witnessing in her.  Through a conversation that I wasn’t even involved in, that woman unfurled a banner for me.  “If life gives you lemons you can make much more than lemonade.  You can squeeze joy out of them.”

I currently have a friend who has lost her marriage, her financial support, her health, her sight and shares an assisted living space with her mother who is confined to a wheelchair.  I put myself under Mary’s banner every Wednesday afternoon.  We talk and we laugh together. Her standard reminds me that, “Contentment has nothing to do with what we have or what we have lost.”