My friend and her hellish life

My friend Mary has been having a simply hellish life lately. She lives with her parents and (sometimes) her 16-year old son, who has a seriously rebellious attitude. Her father is dying of cancer, had a heart attack not so long ago, and has been moved into 24 hour care. She has been in the hospital three times in the last six months for a mysterious GI blood loss problem. She interrupted a burglar breaking into her home on Tuesday, and he got away with jewelry that her grandmother gave to her. And her mother had a stroke (possibly two strokes, they can't tell yet) yesterday and fell down in the shower when no one was home as a result, which led to a horrible head bruise, slurred speech, and a trip to the ER, where she was transferred from acute to neurology and required to remain for observation. At the point when I was talking with my friend, her father didn't yet know that her mother had been admitted, and both my friend and her mother (fortunately lucid) were scared to tell him because he's been doing so badly as it is.

I know that the people reading this post range the religious spectrum about as far as it's possible to range it while still all being good people. I've spent large amounts of my life as an atheist, but the world keeps chipping away at it, and I probably qualify as agnostic right now... because damned if I know. Every time I go to church, I come home feeling a bit more ambivalent about the idea that all this is for nothing except the moment. But I digress...

For those of you that pray... if you could keep her in your prayers, I would thank you for it. Even if I'm ambivalent about the whole matter, she does believe (Catholic), and perhaps Someone is listening after all.