Tonight I will offer simple gratitude. There are days when my energy level is such that conveying coherently the sentiments I want to express is a real challenge. At these times I like to keep it simple, sharing a few thoughts about various random things I am grateful for.
I am grateful for traveling mercies, I truly am. Every day I get on the highway to travel my 26.4 miles down to work and 25.3 miles back and the angels protect me as I drive. If they don’t, God or Somebody does. Tonight as I drove home I got so tired about 40 minutes into the drive that I started praying and prayed the entire rest of the way home (another half hour). I rarely drive sleepy; I have on a few occasions and I did this evening.
I am grateful for old, old friends. This evening I ran across a photo that had been posted on Facebook of a childhood friend and his family from the 1960s. There was my friend, clearly the oldest of a brood of about nine children–siblings and cousins–who had gathered for a grinning group photo. Childhood friends, particularly the ones who are still in your life, can be real treasures. There are a handful of families that our family was friends with–our parents were friends and we kids grew up together, playing, going on camping trips together, and spending a lot of time in each others’ lives.
As our families have all grown older–most of us have families of our own now–it was a matter of time that we would begin losing our parents. I learned this morning that one of “our” mothers died this morning. She had been seriously ill for some months, and while this was not unexpected that doesn’t mean we were ready for it either. My mother was ill during this same time of year nearly 18 years ago, and no matter how serious I knew the illness to be, no matter how I’d faced the possibility of her death, I was still not prepared to get the call that told me she had died. The same was true of my father’s death, though I was sightly more prepared for that. I offered prayers when I’d heard about our friend who had died and her children with whom I played when we were children. Her daughter had been reading this blog to her during long days in the hospital. I was happy to hear that they both found value in reflecting on the blessings in their lives for which they were grateful. I like to think that perhaps my mother greeted this old friend when she got there, wherever “there” is, in that place where there is no more pain. May it be so.
I am grateful that sometimes God watches out for us even, and perhaps especially when we are not watching out for ourselves. I am going to take my rest now and see if I can begin to get more and better quality of sleep. I want to make some adjustments in my routine that will help me improve my overall health and wellbeing. My plan is to enlist help with this from one ore more of my sisters. We shall see how that goes. In the meantime I will continue as best I can to take those actions–even small micro changes–that move me in the direction I want to go. Small steps are steps nonetheless. So I will keep at it and continue to express gratitude each day for the many blessings in my life.
