Gratitude, by Joan Bochmann

I'm skipping forward in Joan's life story to share the words she wrote after she learned that she had lung cancer the first time. What a shock it was to us all! It seemed so unfair. After all, she'd stopped smoking some 20 or 30 years before that. It was the beginning of some very trying times. (After this writing, she beat the cancer and lived in remission for a few years, before it came back with a vengeance.)

GRATITUDE

By Joan Bochmann

I am grateful for a warm bed with soft sheets and a puffy comforter on a cold morning.  I am even more grateful that I have the ability and the will to crawl out of that bed and take steps to warm the house.

I am grateful for winter sunrises.  Grateful for eyes that can watch the eastern horizon as it turns crimson, painting the clouds just above the earth’s curve with shades of magenta, violet and pink.   It takes my breath away and part of me wants it to stand still, to stop its inexorable journey, but it continues to lighten with a brilliance that man has never been able to duplicate. The higher clouds grow pinker and the foothills are bathed in a luscious rose.  At this moment there is such a beautiful light in the atmosphere that I long to be a painter or a photographer.  But it is fleeting.  The sun has risen fully and God has graciously given me another day.

I turn to my Bible and spend the next hour in the lap of my Father.  I am grateful for the glimpses of wisdom he gives me—a little more each day.  I am grateful for inspirational resources and teachings that affirm or alter my beliefs.  Like my reaction to the sunrise, I want more—more of this peaceful, prayerful hour. 

I am grateful that He came to this little planet, a blip in his gigantic creation; that he came as a baby and lived (and died) as an example, a living pattern, for his beloved creatures and that he devised such an elegant plan for the rescue of doomed humanity.

I am grateful that He walked with me when the doctor delivered the dreaded news.   I wish I could say that I was perfectly calm and my faith and trust was so great that I felt no anxiety.   I can’t.  That took a little while.  I walked through the valley for a few days with all of the “why me questions?”   

I am grateful, though, that He hasn’t deserted me for a single minute and never will.  That He gives me friends and family who care, who help, who remind me of His love (and their’s.)

Most of all, I am grateful that he gives me HOPE.   Only He knows if I will beat this thing, but even if I don’t, I still win because I am His child and when He decides my work here is done.  He will take me home.  How amazing is that?