by Robb Hiller
Faith
The final point in the triangle within the triangle is faith. It’s the foundation of my life, as well as of the Power of 3.
When we tap into a wellspring of strength and wisdom much greater than ourselves, we find the resources we need to meet any challenge and to bring meaning to our existence.
Time magazine reports that
study after study has found that religious people tend to be less depressed and less anxious than nonbelievers, better able to handle the vicissitudes of life than nonbelievers. A 2015 survey by researchers at the London School of Economics and the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands found that participating in a religious organization was the only social activity associated with sustained happiness—even more than volunteering for a charity, taking educational courses or participating in a political or community organization.[6]
I’ve observed this same outcome among friends, colleagues, and clients. It’s certainly been true of my own journey.
What does brain research say about meditation and prayer? Neuroscientists have discovered that prayerful meditation slows you down and helps you become more aware of your breathing, auditory listening, and the sensory prefrontal cortex of your brain. When we prayerfully meditate, we have more gray matter available, which is linked to decision making and working memory. What I find amazing is that people who do this regularly have the same gray matter in their prefrontal cortex as people half their age.[7] That’s great news for all of us over fifty!
The science behind this is simple yet profound. Of a study done by neuroscientist Sara Lazar of the Harvard Medical School, those that meditated over eight weeks at an average of twenty-seven minutes a day saw a shrinkage of their amygdala. This is the part of the brain that can send us into a tizzy if we aren’t careful, and it is where anxiety, stress, and aggression come from.[8]
Adversity often shakes our faith, sometimes to its foundations. When you most feel a need for faith, you might have very little of it! The unique part of this triangle is that you don’t need much faith at all—it can be as small as a mustard seed but still be powerful. The Bible points out that this mustard seed of faith can be the foundation to support and strengthen us as we carry out whatever situation or role we are in each day.
I’ve found my Christian faith to be indispensable not only in facing cancer but in finding my way through all of life. What does faith mean to you? What do you trust? What truths are foundational to your life? Whether or not you identify with an organized religion, your faith likely includes beliefs, decisions, commitments, even shoulds and shouldn’ts that support and guide you. Faith involves things you might not be able to prove to a skeptic, but to you, their reality is beyond doubt. Faith can lift you up “on eagle’s wings,” as one contemporary hymn puts it.
The Power of 3 relies on the power of the triangle, that geometric shape that can hold large loads without collapsing or changing shape. I’ve found that the greatest triangle of all is the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—the undergirding reality of the Christian faith.
The triangle of the Trinity is free to all, and there is no wait. In this triangle, we have access to the power of the Trinity through prayer.
An Advocate at the Emergency Room
I learned the importance of inviting advocates during the whole of my cancer experience, but there was a time at the beginning of chemo treatments when this was particularly apparent. I had just finished my first all-day chemo session, and I walked out of Mayo Clinic in a daze. Home was a miserable hour and a half drive away, and I felt nauseous for most of the drive.
I was okay for the first week afterward, but when my follow-up meds changed, my body began to painfully react to the chemotherapy. Another day later, I knew something wasn’t right. The pain was getting stronger. I could feel it in my bones—aching . . . throbbing . . . unrelenting. It grew in intensity as though I were baking outside in a hot July sun. The nausea was also increasing.
I tried the medications the doctor gave me. Nothing worked. I tried sleeping but couldn’t. The pain was so bad, I was in the fetal position. I tried watching TV as a distraction, but I couldn’t get my mind off my pain. The evening wore on with no relief.
While I writhed in pain, Pam called my doctors for advice. I hadn’t eaten or drunk much in two days. The doctor wrote a new prescription. While I lay on the couch, Pam researched everything she could about my symptoms online and offered what encouragement she could.
I felt helpless as the hours passed in slow motion—10 p.m. . . . 11 p.m. . . . 12 a.m. . . .
At 1 a.m., Pam, who now felt as powerless as I did, decided we’d had enough. “That’s it,” she announced. “We’re getting you to the ER.”
We left in a rush. Pam usually fastidiously follows the rules of the road, but this time she zipped past cars on the highway, sped along side streets, and aggressively rolled through stop signs.
We arrived at the ER, checked in, and were quickly ushered into an exam room. My pain had grown far worse. My entire body felt like one massive aching tooth, times twenty, coupled with severe nausea. I wish I could have described my pain to the nurse, but I was growing incoherent. My face said it all.
Before long, a friendly doctor entered and instructed the nurse to give me a shot of morphine. Before I could get that beautiful painkiller, however, they needed to do blood work and administer a series of tests.
We waited and waited for the tech to get started. I didn’t understand why they weren’t fixing the pain. I wanted relief. Finally, the IV went in and vials of blood were sucked out of my system. Even in my incoherence, I felt like saying, “Can’t we just stop the pain?”
Once they had taken my blood, the nurse returned to my ER room with the morphine. I started to feel “happy” as the pain slowly subsided.
After more tests and analysis, the ER team gave me another pain med and sent me home. They had ruled out other causes of my pain and sickness and thought I would rebound back to a somewhat normal state—normal, that is, considering the chemo making its way through my body.
The next night, however, I was back in the same ER with all the same symptoms. I was still in pain. I was nauseous. Eating or drinking felt impossible. After we repeated the exact same routine as the previous night, they admitted me to the hospital and put me in a general room. Strong morphine-type drugs weren’t helping. We were nowhere close to discovering the real cause of all the symptoms and what to do about it.
Over the next few days, I saw numerous doctors. Nothing changed. The pain was still there, and I felt hideously bad.
My son Ryan visited; my daughter, Katie, called from California; my eldest son, Rick, called; good friends stopped by; and my sister-in-law Nan brought a teddy bear. They all encouraged me to keep going. I barely responded. I still wasn’t eating, still felt nauseous, and still felt pain deep in my bones. I was lethargic and discouraged.
What I didn’t know was that I was starting to slip away—physically, mentally, and spiritually. I was drained and had no hope or energy to fight back. How could I combat this pain if I didn’t know what was causing it? My normally positive and determined disposition fell, slowly succumbing to my physical conditions. Months later, Pam told me she could see I was losing the will to live.
Thankfully, the doctors could also plainly see that I wasn’t doing well, and they moved me again.
I was now in the oncology ward. The hospital doctors grasped that I was struggling but were puzzled by my symptoms and how to help. They tried different combinations of medicine without making progress.
By day four, my pain was unbearable. Not even morphine helped. I just felt awful.
The emotional and spiritual torment Pam was experiencing finally got to be too much for her. Her courageous hope began to fade. A dam of tears threatened to burst, and she hurriedly left the room. She had to do something.
Pam sought an advocate.
Pam saw a nurse in the hallway and quickly walked over to her. P
am introduced herself and said, “My husband needs help. Nothing has been working these past few days. We need help.”
The Fairview Southdale nurse—Susan—listened to Pam and studied my chart. “I’m going to talk to a doctor,” she said, “but I’ll be back soon.” She took a step, paused, and then turned back to Pam. “I understand how you are feeling right now. Oncology is my specialty, and I’ve done this for thirty-five years. We’re going to figure this out. Trust me.”
Those words made their way into Pam’s spirit and revived her diminishing hope. Pam knew Susan had heard us. She thought, I’ve found someone with real expertise who will help us.
Soon after, Susan came back with the floor’s oncology doctor. He looked at all my charts. He asked me several questions, paused, and looked up.
“Susan,” he said, “run to the pharmacy and get Claritin for his pain.” With his signed order, Susan rushed off.
The doctor turned to Pam and me and said, “If this works, Robb will start feeling better within an hour. Then we can put him on a schedule to help him through his chemo and trial drug. I’ll be back to check on him.”
An oncology doctor who constantly dealt in life and death prescribed a common allergy pill for my pain? I couldn’t believe it.
My first thought was, Why should this work? Nothing else has. But somehow hope worked its way in. What do we have to lose? I remember praying, Lord, please let this work.
I know this is hard to believe, but within a few hours, I started to notice a difference. The pain eased. I felt so much better by late afternoon, and a day and a half later, I was eating again with no pain and no nausea. I was well enough to be discharged and so grateful to be going back home.
Pam saw me losing the will to live, and neither of us knew what to do. We were both at the end of our ropes. But instead of losing hope, Pam sought an advocate at just the right time. And in this case, it was the difference between death and life.
Not all situations are life-or-death, but I guarantee that your life will be improved as you open the door to the advocates of family, friends, and faith around you. In the next chapter, we’ll look at effective ways to invite—and be—advocates.
Practicing the Power of 3
It turns out that getting and giving help is, as Zig Ziglar says, a lot like motivation and bathing—we need it every day! Think through the following questions:
Who are your trusted friends that you can call at three in the morning and know they would be there for you? And in your family, who are your trusted advocates? How does this impact you today?
How often are you reaching out to develop advocates at work and in everyday life? Is there an opportunity here to strengthen your triangle?
Who do you need to call today to schedule a time to meet?
Is your faith helping you grow each day? If not to the extent you desire, what might be a next step to grow in this area of your life?
Last, since it is also vital to be an advocate to others, who could you encourage and help while expecting nothing in return?
[1] Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), 3.
[2] John 13:34
[3] John 15:13
[4] Galatians 6:2
[5] Galatians 6:5
[6] Bryan Walsh, “Does Spirituality Make You Happy?” Time, August 7, 2017, https://time.com/4856978/spirituality-religion-happiness/.
[7] Melanie Curtin, “Neuroscience Reveals 50-Year-Olds Can Have the Brains of 25-Year-Olds If They Do This 1 Thing,” Inc., October 23, 2018, https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/neuroscience-shows-that-50-year-olds-can-have-brains-of-25-year-olds-if-they-do-this.html.
[8] Sue McGreevey, “Eight Weeks to a Better Brain,” Harvard Gazette, January 21, 2011, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-to-a-better-brain/.
CHAPTER 7Cultivate Life-Giving Connections: Lean On Family, Friends, and Faith
To solve any problem, here are three questions to ask yourself: First, what could I do? Second, what could I read? And third, who could I ask?
JIM ROHN
AS I WAS GROWING UP, my dad taught me many life skills, but he was especially intentional about mentoring me in business. My dad took over the movie theater business in small-town Marshall, Minnesota, when I was just ten years old. The theater where I first saw The Sound of Music was a seven-hundred-seat venue in a town of fewer than seven thousand! My dad also owned an outdoor drive-in movie theater big enough for a couple hundred cars. Yes, people would load up the family and sit in their car to watch a movie. If they had a pickup truck or station wagon, they would pull in backward and let the kids hang out the tailgate. Of course, the drive-in was also a place to take a date. Hopefully she would slide over next to you as you watched John Wayne take on the bad guys.
My dad gave me the worst jobs at the drive-in, like cleaning the concession stand and scrubbing toilets. What was sometimes worst of all was picking up the litter the morning after a showing. What lessons! And all for the take-home pay of $1.25 an hour. Dad put the rest of my pay into a savings account, teaching me the value of saving for my future whether I liked it or not.
When I was a high school sophomore, I overheard my dad complaining about declining concession sales at the drive-in. It didn’t take long for my head to start popping with ideas for increasing sales. The concession stand was a large walk-in affair, like a long cafeteria-style service where you could grab what you wanted and pay at the end. My friends made fun of the dreary, dated interior, and they wondered why getting a Coney dog was such an ordeal.
I asked dad if he wanted to hear my suggestions, and it turned out he wanted more than what I could come up with off the top of my head. He sent me to the town’s new library to study industry trends and instructed me to present my thoughts on paper. I thought it was odd for a fifteen-year-old to put together something Dad called a business plan. Little did I know that he was using his schooling and experience to teach me the rudiments of business.
I grabbed a fresh tablet and multiple colored pens. The librarian taught me how to do research, an invaluable process when I started college. One of my big findings? Painting the concession stand in bold oranges and yellows would encourage people to eat and drink more.
My report so enthused my dad that he gave the go-ahead on all my ideas, with one major condition. It was up to me to do all the ordering, rearranging, and painting. The sales register kept ringing up and up, and by the end of the season, it was clear my ideas had worked. Putting large tubs of buttered popcorn up front and moving little boxes to the back was a game changer. Soda sales shot up too. My one dud idea was preloading the Coney dogs with the customary barbecue sauce and setting them out ahead of time. The buns turned to mush and had to be tossed. But failure was a great lesson.
Whenever I had a question, Dad was there. He gave me plenty of leeway, but I see now he was guiding the whole process. That summer I saw in action the power of advocates to help me learn and grow!
Results of Developing Key Advocates
Human beings are designed to connect and enjoy relationships in every arena of life. When the opposite happens, we feel pain. Many people know the emptiness of a home losing love and energy. I’ve seen the same thing happen elsewhere. Once-caring schools can dry up. Apathy can overtake a town or city. The downplaying or death of relationships happens in the workplace all the time. When a company lacks advocates, the atmosphere suffers, employees find themselves stifled, and customers can sense a lack of caring in how they are treated. Employees end up working for a paycheck rather than passion. Days get long, and even the best workers can waste away, waiting for the clock to hit quitting time.
A healthy culture—a life-giving atmosphere—is the direct result of developing advocates, quality relationships with people who truly care for us. And those relationships deepen when we have conversations focused on real needs and a readiness to help. In fact, if you want to cultivate a great culture in any setting, the Po
wer of 3 will help you take things to the next level.
Cultures rise and fall on relationships. And relationships depend on the quality of conversations. Talking together, with kindness and honesty, one-on-one and in groups, is how everything positive happens that will affect the health of a culture. Here’s a simple equation you can remember:
Advocates + Caring Conversations = Healthy Culture
Advocates can come into our lives in a variety of seasons and situations. We can find them among our family, neighbors, faith community, and coworkers. Look around. Who are your best advocates today? How are you investing time with those uplifting people? What can you do to further develop those relationships? How are you widening your circle?
If you’re busy and barely making it through the day, you might be saying to yourself, I’m too busy to connect with others. I just need downtime.
But if you see the benefit of inviting advocates into your life and want to make those relationships a priority, there are a couple of quick ways to jump-start that goal.
Your first step? Think of a handful of people you already know but have missed connecting with. Whoever comes to mind, send them a short encouraging text and ask them to grab a cup of coffee or schedule a time for a phone call. You’ll be surprised at the positive lift you get just by setting up a meeting. The uplift is even greater when you get together to reacquaint yourself with an old friend or a coworker.
Your next step? Make a regular habit of developing advocates and being an advocate by setting aside just minutes each week for a few simple tasks. This small investment of time benefits everyone . . . including you! It leads to meaningful discoveries and better relationships. As you learn about others, you will grow too. You can try this in a work setting, a place with great opportunities to make a difference. Why? Because developing advocates and being an advocate for coworkers is a top area of focus if you want to be successful. As we have all heard before, we need to be friends to have friends. Here are three simple ways to become an advocate to others with no strings attached: