Gratitude for Bones

A friend of mine is looking at knee replacement surgery sometime in the next year. She is predictably wary and anxious, but she wrote a FB post about all the things that her knees have done for her.  I've decided to take a page from her book, as I finally reach the point of more-or-less full recovery from my broken ankle, and say "Pffft!" to the toe I broke 10 days ago.

 

Some of what my ankle and feet bones have done for me:

 

Carried me and my backpack into the wilds of Glacier National Park and Algonquin Provincial Park, throughout Isle Royale National Park, and along the trails of western Pennsylvania.

 

Taken me on beach walks and long hikes from Prince Edward Island to Key West and from British Columbia to the Virginia Shore.

 

Helped me wander Iona and the Cinque Terre, Paris and Rome, Boston and Chicago and Washington, D.C. and Vancouver and Portland, Chautauqua and St. Augustine.

 

Pedaled bikes and hung onto horses and skied through the snow and danced through numerous dubious concert venues.

 

Walked babies at 3:00 a.m. and accompanied clients to court and ran after troubled students and paced through sermons and retreats.

 

And for years and years, excluding most of this one, taken me on the long walks so essential to my physical and mental and spiritual health, around the Shaker Lakes in Cleveland and to the Highland Park Reservoir in Pittsburgh and alongside the fields at the Wernersville Retreat Center.

 

It turns that that that break on January 2 was a really bad one.  But you can see why I have been so determined to make my plate and screws work like real bones.  I can't run yet ~ I've tried and it's as if I have a stack of bricks in my ankle ~ but I am really grateful for bones and spare parts that walk.

The 30 Days of Gratitude Debate

There's a FB thing going on: each day in November, post something for which you're grateful.

 

I don't usually bother with those sorts of posts.  Way too much discipline for me, to remember something for 30 days in a row.  Or even to get started on the first day. 

 

But this year, I'm giving it a try.  (Having started on the second day, or maybe the third.  I can't remember.)

 

Some astute writers have criticized this effort.  (Not me personally, but in general.)  Too public.  Too likely to generate social media envy.  Too likely to turn into bragging.

 

I get that; I totally get that.  Often when people post about the triumphs of their children or their own glorious parenting experiences, I metaphorically curl up in sadness.  I think, "Yeah, that used to be me, but no more."  And I am sure that some of my own posts have the same effects on others, including people who have become dear friends due to our losses of beloved children.

 

But when I read the gratefulness posts from many of my friends, what I see is not misplaced triumphalism, but miracles.  I have so many friends now who have in recent years lost parents or spouses or children or homes or jobs or health (and some of them have lost in more than one of those categories), and when I see their expressions of gratitude for the small gifts of life, I think: miracle.

 

There is a woman with whom I am FB friends who lost her son to suicide five months ago.  This evening she posted something that caused me to go back and look at what I had been writing at five months.  It was the beginning of February, and I was back in seminary.  As I told this friend, I recall feeling as if I were underwater all the time.  Here's some of what I blogged:

 

"[I]t is nearly 9:00 am and I am just getting up. I was awake three hours ago but I knew that would make for too many hours in the day and so I went back to sleep. I will be up late into the night because I won't be able to sleep then.

[I] have to pace myself carefully. I am doing things: going to class, studying, writing papers, working with a couple of people, planning for the future. Each takes so much energy and requires so much recovery time. I forget what I've focused on within five minutes of reading or hearing it. I look at notes and say to myself: We had an entire lecture on that? I lose everything, little things and really important things. I stumble across them later and can't imagine how they landed in the place they did. I write papers and have no idea whether they bear any resemblance to what is expected. I make schedules for accomplishing things and then I stare into space.

I am still writing thank-you notes. The cost of each one is so high. Only a few lines, but each reminds me of something else ~ a relationship, an occasion in the past, someone else entirely whose claim on my time is perhaps more urgent. I did not know, Before, that when I received an acknowledgment from someone for flowers or words offered in a time of sorrow, that the note itself might represent a morning's work. Or a week's."

 

I could not at that time have come up with a single thing for which to be grateful.  And I have plenty of moments, five years later, when the grief washes over me with such intensity that I wonder whether I will still be able to breathe when it recedes.  But I also have much for which I feel genuine gratitude.

 

I am doing 30 days, more or less, of gratitude because I can.  And that seems kind of huge to me.

Gratitude

I have been in a real funk lately.  I blame the snowballing of events over the past few months:

The call process, which was extremely stressful from about June to September, the period in which: my new church and I embarked upon serious conversation, the church decided to extend a call to me, and I was approved for ordination within 24 hours of . . . 

My breast cancer diagnosis, which launched my family and I on a ~ so far ~ four months and counting medical ordeal ~

A new life in a new church, this time as the pastor, which would have been a challenge all by its lonesome self ~ 

My ordination and second surgery, which occurred within three weeks of one another ~

Our first attempt at Christmas at home since Josh's death, which brought both its joys and its deep challenges ~

And that's only the big stuff.

And yet . . . I am well aware that that sense of being completely overwhelmed by Way Too Much is fertile ground for the work of the one whom Ignatius calls the enemy of our human nature.  You can call and visualize him, her, or it whatever and however you want.  I, for one, am convinced, after the events of three-plus years ago, that there is indeed a force of evil abroad in this universe.

I am also well aware that the best antidote to that particular power is an insistent response of gratitude.  I'm not good at it, but I'm aware of it.  And lest anyone think that I am completely and utterly hopeless in this regard, I offer, herewith, five things for which I am grateful at this very moment:

1.  The breakfast I shared with The Lovely Daughter and Friend this morning, which includes gratefulness for the fact that our community can support a marvelous new bakery, gratefulness for a Nutella and banana crepe, and gratefulness for the girls' friendship of eighteen years.

2.  The many safe, long drives I have made to and from my church, my home, and various medical facilities around here, which includes especially gratitude that there have been no deer-vehicle encounters.

3. The fact that there are two world-class medical facilities within walking distance of my house, which includes gratitude for [most of] the care I have received there, and for some of the extraordinarily gifted and skilled people who work there.

4.  A church that has invited me into a loving community and offered me big challenges, both of them just right for me right now.

5.  Young adult children who are thoughtful, analytical, insightful, and ambitious for their futures, and eager to discuss all kinds of discernment issues and also Somali pirates (another post).

There's no question that  a lot of crappy and unfair and devastating things have happened in my life in the past few years.

And so the gratitude I feel is both hard-won and genuine, stacked up as it always is against a wall of anguish that threatens to crush me every day. 

I am, truly, very grateful for all that I have written about here.

Image: Young Woman at Window by Jay Miller, here.