In All Things

In a Worldmag.com commentary  titled “Christian Contentment,” Marvin Olasky writes:

“The key is to understand that everything is a gift from God and that, since Eden, thorns and thistles hinder everything we do. Starting from an entitlement perspective, all difficulties are undeserved. Starting from an awareness of sin, all good things are undeserved.”

And the Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Thessalonica:

“In all things give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.” (1 Thessalonians 5:18)

Last month during Brent’s hospitalization, I had a moment of clarity unlike anything I have ever experienced before. I was on the elevator, headed home to sleep while Brent slept in a bed on the seventh floor, leg with the vein-clots propped up on pillows.  A woman got on the elevator with me at the sixth floor and I could tell that she was absolutely exhausted.  We made small talk while the elevator went down, and when she asked, I told her my husband had been on the seventh floor for going on one week. She shared that it had been four weeks for her husband this time, two years since a random act of violence claimed his health and changed their lives forever. 

I walked to the car imagining twenty-eight days of the double-life, wife and nurse, holding it together at home and at the hospital.  After four weeks, did it start to feel normal? After four weeks, was it still absolutely agonizing to leave your husband in a hospital bed and return to sleep alone in a house that no longer felt like a home? I felt exposed and ashamed of the self-pity I had indulged over the past several days.  

The doctors all said that Brent would be fine, would recover completely and return to our home-sweet-home with the pine kitchen and the pink tile bathroom in a matter of days. Truthfully, this hospital stay was merely an inconvenience, an added burden, a hiccup in our respective schedules. Just minutes before I stepped on the elevator, he had given me a kiss and a hug and we laughed in our usual way about -- oh, I can’t remember what. But what if it was his fourth week too and we didn’t have this certainty and hope? What if he was suffering? What if I faced the possibility that we might never again lie together in the dark, side-by-side on the sheets with red posies and two pugs tucked in too? I really hadn’t thought of that.

There is so much to be thankful for that we don’t even know about. Sure,  I often look at my life and count blessing upon blessing, but these are only the apparent ones. The reality is that every single moment is packed full of tiny miracles and as long as I am alive I have an infinite number of reasons to give thanks in all things - for Brent and hope and health and grace and that even a bad situation is never as bad as it could be. For Christ and the mercy that makes everything else only icing on the cake and far more than I deserve. How easily I forget that I should not be striving for mere contentment, but for crazy joy everyday and relentless gratitude in everything. As a Christian, there is simply no other way to live.

And so I am picking up where I left off:

#12  sunrise at the river

#13 physical therapy (and pugs that try to help)

 

#14 peaches (and peach cobbler!)

#15  church cookbooks

#16  extra fuses for the air conditioner

#17  Mama’s recipes

#18  neighbors

#19  pink skies

#20  an evening rain shower when the heat index is 104 degrees…..at 6:30 p.m.!