What if you woke up today with only the things you thanked God for yesterday?

One of my FB friends posted this query two days ago. It's one of those questions to which my first response is "ouch!" because i just didn't have a very grateful day. It's not so much that I was feeling UNgrateful as that I was just... busy. I was on a roll with an important (read: last-minute, down-to-the-wire, procrastination-limit-fully-reached) project, and I pretty much worked on it until my time for the day ran out. I was pleased with my progress and only had a little left to finish the next day, but it (I) didn't leave much time for other things.

Now, sometimes the work of our hands is surely a prayer, and in the case of this project, it most emphatically was. Remember the two people with cancer from my first post? This project was a scrapbook for #two, Paul Pavao. All of my love and concern and sadness and hope and desire for God to let me (selfish) and Chloe (still kinda selfish) and humanity (an unselfish afterthought) have a little more time with him are bound up in those pages. However, I wasn't giving vent to a real flood of thankfulness for the time we have already had in there, mostly just begging for more. It wasn't until we sat together in the woods with the Pavaos at our evening gathering that I was moved to gratitude for a weekend with them.

See, I find it is much easier to be grateful for the good things I have right now, or for the end of hard things I've been through, than for ever having been given good things that appear to have run out for now. THUS, to be perfectly candid with you, I have not yet come to a place of being thankful at all that I ever had cancer. Maybe one day I will; I certainly admire the heck out of my brothers and sisters who can find the grace to think that way. This is a major difference between me and Paul: I'm merely thankful for how God brought me through and out of my diagnosis and treatments, while Paul embraces his and thanks God for whatever it is He is invisibly, profoundly working in Paul's life.

(For me, it's like I can see that some good things happened (to/for me and to/for others) because of my medical crisis, but when I try to make the equation come out even, I still see negative numbers, impossibilities, null sets. Paul comes up with a perfect, elegant equation stretching miles beyond my imagination's boundaries. I'm still tangled up in the basics of trying to balance out just two sides.)

Fortunately, it was the first day of our Ingathering holiday, a festival our church observes once a year that includes lots of time to be together, a love feast at the Lord's table, and singing and dancing, especially in the company of bunches of people we love but whom we don't live near or see NEARly often enough, like our friends from Atlanta and California. I'm a reformed enough heathen at least that I remembered to breathe a prayer of thanksgiving when I saw my dear friend Ariel, for example.

If I had woken up the day my friend made her post with only the things I had thanked God for the day before, I would have (drum roll, please!):

• a weekend with Hannah, Shammah (Paul) and their children
• two weeks with Ariel and David and children
• an Ingathering
• my sweet beloved daughter, Chloe
• an extra sticky-tape dispenser (in the back of my desk drawer)
• one 2011 CR-V from my grandma
• my bed (complete with awesome sheets and memory foam via Mom)
• and thorny vines plus long thorn clusters for a crown of thorns I made

Of course, the following day I would've had a LOT more to list, because I was chastened and pricked by the question and, of course, my meager answer. ;) Such is life!

So what would be on your list today if you woke up with only the things you thanked God for yesterday? A little food for thought. I'd love to hear your answers!

Love, Ashima