The first thing that they wish for seems to be, "I wish somebody would listen to me." I hear it from husbands about wives; I hear it about wives from husbands. I hear it from kids to parents. "I wish my Mom would listen to me." I hear parents saying, "I wish my kid would hear me once in a while." I hear it in many, many relationships, even at work, at home, in the church. "I wish my pastor would listen to me." Maybe he's tired of listening to you. But, "I wish someone would listen to me," or "I wish I had a best friend who would listen to me." What do we really mean? What are we really saying? I think that men and women all over are saying, I wish I had somebody who would listen to me without judging me, or without being critical, or more, without having to give me a solution for whatever it is that is wrong in my life. I think we are longing for someone to listen to us to see our point and to just go, "Um, huh. Um, huh."

I have breast cancer. I've gone through the chemo and the losing of the hair bit and all of that, and I'm told that my cancer is aggressive. I want some doctor to listen to me. I want the technician who is going to take a CBC, a blood test for me, to listen to me when I say, "I have veins that collapse. Please, please use a really, really small needle," or "Could we get so and so, Annie, is she here because she is the one who can do that without my veins collapsing." I want them to listen to me.

If we have an attorney, we want an attorney who will listen to us. If we have a teacher, we want a teacher who will listen to us. If we are a student, we want a teacher who will listen to us. If we are the teacher part, we want the students to listen to us. We wish for somebody who will listen to us. I am blessed by having a husband who is not only my cherisher, but my listener. I want a pastor who listens to me. Mine does. I want some person around me to understand that I want to be listened to. Sometimes one of the best ways of listening is by hugging.

This week I got a letter from a woman who has been writing me for some years. She has been a reader of mine and she told me in her letter -- she chronicled the events in her life -- mother, adopted mother, the death of that mother, the abuse that happened in the childhood. Now her birth father is dying and her best friend, her mother-in-law, died last month of cancer. And at the end of the letter she says, "You know what I want the most. I want somebody to put their arms around me, hug me so that I can just bawl my eyes out." What is she asking for? She's asking for somebody to listen to her. I want somebody to listen to me. We don't need a whole bunch of people, but I want at least one. I want at least two. I want at least just a few.

Another wish that we have is, I wish I had someone who believed what I say. In my work, in my speaking all over, I have many, many opportunities to talk on a one-to-one basis with people and I have talked in the last four years to a great many women who tell me about some kind of abuse from their childhood. It's sexual, it's emotional, it's verbal, it's physical, it's an abuse of some kind, and the conversation most generally goes like this. I say to them, "Did you tell anybody?" And they say, "No." And although I know the answer, I ask them, "Why didn't you tell somebody? Why didn't you tell your mother? Why didn't you tell your teacher? Why didn't you tell your pastor? Why didn't you tell your youth director?" The answer is most always the same. "I didn't think anyone would believe me." So, the second wish that I've heard over and over again is, "Won't somebody please believe me."

I had to change oncologists in the beginning of my mastectomy and the chemo treatment and all that, and I changed for one very good reason. I had a doctor as caring as he might have been with other patients, as good as he might have been, he didn't listen to me, and secondly, he really didn't believe what I was saying to him. I wished for a different situation; I wished for a different kind of thing, and I hear that all over the United States and everywhere I go in relationships of all kinds. I hear, "I wish somebody would believe me." Now someone comes along and says, "Yeah, but how do you know when some lady comes up to you after a meeting and she says, `This happened to me and that happened to me,' how do you know she is not making the whole thing up? How do you know she is not flat-out lying? How do you know she is really talking straight to you?" My answer to that is I don't need to know.

What I need to do is believe her. What I need to do is to listen to her and then believe her. It is not my job to judge her as to whether she is embellishing this story or whether she is totally flat-out making it up. That is not my thing in life. My thing in life is to say, "I'm listening to you," and secondly, "God help me to just accept her where she is, whatever place she's at."

Isn't that the way God has accepted us? He said we can come to Him. He said forgiveness is ours just for the asking. It seems to me that when we come to God, He listens to us and then He believes us, right where we are. Remember the old song, "Just as I am, without one plea?" Just as I am; just like I am right this second, right this moment.

The third thing that I hear as far as wishes go is this wonderful thing about, "I wish that somebody who hears me and who believes what I am saying, I wish they would be on my side." When a couple go through a divorce, it's amazing how people say, "I'm not going to take sides. I'm just going to be neutral." Sort of like Switzerland during the Second World War. "I'm going to be neutral; I'm not going to take sides." Yet, they already have taken a side; they have taken a position. I want somebody on my side. I want my husband on my side. I want my friend on my side. I just want a friend that says to me, "Joyce, I don't know what you're going through and I don't know how hard it is for you and I don't even begin to understand the unfairness of it or the rejection of it, but I want you to know that I'm on your side."

It was Malcolm Muggeridge who said that the worst disease in the world is not leprosy, and then he named some other diseases. He said, "The worst disease in the whole world is being unloved, uncared for and unwanted." So, I want people on my side. I want to know if that is happening with me. And now I can see some of you saying, "Well, that's real nice about you, Joyce. That's real terrific, but I don't have a human being in the world." And my heart breaks, but the good news is that when we don't feel like we have one single person in the world, we do have God. God is a master at listening, at believing what we say, and part of the reason He can believe what we say is because He knows all the facts. He knows far more facts about you than you do. He know the whys; He knows about the unfairness; He know about the injustice that has been done to you; He knows about your pain; He knows about the years that you have suffered. He knows every step of your path, so He not only believes you, He believes you based on the facts that He knows about you. He knew you, David says, "He knew me before I was born." So He knows us before we were born.

And, lastly, He is on our side whether we feel it, whether we can sense it, whether we can see it, He is on our side. He paid an enormous price for us. He sent His Son and then He gave us forgiveness, this channel of forgiveness. He also gave us great mercy and great grace, and so if there is nobody in your life right this second that you can see that listens to you or that believes you or that is on your side, there is a God. He does listen, He does hear us and He is on our side.

I don't know how to say it any clearer than I am hearing from you all over the United States, every time I speak, that these are three wishes that we dearly wish for. I thank God that we can find them; that we can get them and I think that the good news of the message is everything is going to be all right, even though it looks horrible. Everything is going to be all right. I'm staking my life on that right now with cancer. I need to know that if I have only got three years or two years or thirty years, whatever it is, God will be listening. He will believe me and He will be on my side.

I'm suggesting to you that if you don't have a human being that you can have God with skin on, so to speak, if you don't have that kind of a human being in your life that your prayer be, "Lord, send me someone. I wish, Lord, for someone to hear me, to believe me and to be on my side." God is listening and He is not listening afar off. He is listening and He is listening right now. I want those wishes for me as well as for you, and I have the assurance that I believe in a God whom I can trust for these answers, whom I can trust for this person to come along, whom I can trust with even something like cancer or anything else that is hideous. I can trust Him. He will provide those answers for those three wishes.

Floyd Brown: Joyce, thank you for a wonderful message.

Joyce Landorf Heatherley: You're welcome, Floyd.

Brown:  So many pertinent points there and I want to touch on some of them, but prior to getting into the elements of your talk, I would like to ask this question. You were a committed person prior to having cancer. It must have had a tremendous impact on your life. How did it change you? What did it mean to you?

Heatherley:  I think having cancer is a very beautiful and a very terrible gift all in one package. It's terrible because it does turn your life upside down. I don't know anything worse than the diagnosis of having cancer, then having chemo treatments and all the other things that go with that. It's an experience that even I as a writer and as a speaker, I can't put into words yet. I may be able to sometime, but it was so horrible and every step of the way you are depending on the Lord and you're asking your friends to pray and they are praying, but you feel like you have just been set adrift in this huge, huge ocean. So it is terrible; it's a terrible gift.

At the same time, it is a beautiful gift because it's just like it takes all the scales off your eyes. You see people very, very, very clearly. You see situations; you don't have the need to get so angry about being stuck in traffic, for one thing. You find you have much more tolerance because compared to what you're thinking and what you are going through, having cancer is not as bad as somebody else's hurts or somebody else's pain, and I hear stories, and I imagine you do to all the time of someone who really is in a far greater pit than we are.

The people who came through the Holocaust -- or who died in the Holocaust -- I don't know that kind of pain; I only know my own kind of pain, so it makes you look at everybody in a different light, and having a life-threatening disease means that we all know we are going to die. But it just means that those boundary lines have come in a little closer and that our chances of dying may be a great deal sooner than yours, for instance. Now you could be hit with a truck tomorrow and be gone just like that.

But with cancer those boundaries are brought in a little bit farther. So then, the next thought that you have in your mind is, "Okay, if I have thirty years or if I have three years or if I have two months, what am I really going to do with my life? What do I want to say? Do I need to apologize to somebody? Do I have such unfinished business between so-and-so and me that I need to go to them, that I need to talk to them." And you become very conscious of the fact that you're sitting here, if your thinking, "Okay, if I am going to be incapacitated by cancer, if I am going to have a long- suffering time -- my mother died of lung and breast cancer and had seven weeks of intense suffering -- if I am going to go through that, what am I going to do before I get to that point and what if it's tomorrow?"

And so it changes your outlook in your viewpoint on dealing with your children, dealing with your friends, dealing with your associates, dealing with your mate, and in that respect it's beautiful because it is like somebody says to us, "You might not have too much time. What would you like to say?"

I think the first article that I ever wrote was for Phil Kerr Musicals in his little paper called, "Melody" and I didn't even know I was a writer at that point and I still don't even know if I am now, but I wrote, "What would you do if you knew you had three minutes to live? Would you apologize to somebody, would you make a phone call, would you write a letter, would you go see somebody, would you tell somebody you were sorry, would you tell somebody you loved them? What would you do?" And I think cancer becomes this beautiful gift when it does that.

Brown: Let me ask you one other question on that, if I may, because a very dear friend of mine years ago died. He was a minister and he says, "Floyd, you know what?" He says, "Thank God you have the faith that you have been preaching about all these years." How did your faith come into this?

Heatherley:  It was always there. I think that it has just been strengthened by this knowledge that I know I may not have very much time and God's presence seems to be much stronger than it ever was and we are all in God's hands, you know.

Brown: You know, we lost one of the dearest persons in the world to cancer, David Hardin, right off this program.

Heatherley:  David Hardin, yes.

Brown: And so we feel so close to it here at the Chicago Sunday Evening Club.

Heatherley:  He was very precious to me in a long, long letter. He was wonderful to me.

Brown: He had that ability to reach out to people and do things and that's what you are doing.

Heatherley:  He did. He really did.

Brown:  Quickly. How do you get people to listen to you? Do you first have to become a good listener? Got about a half a minute.

Heatherley:  Yes. That's it. That's the secret. We are prone to want to give solutions; we are prone to pat somebody on the back and say, "God bless you. Everything is going to be fine." We need to learn to listen before we can be a good listener.

Brown:  And then when it becomes your turn, they will have the patience to spend time with you.

Heatherley: That's right. That's right.

Brown:  Well, God has blessed you well, and you are blessing us well with your testimony.