What are you choosing today?

A few months before Cody was diagnosed with epilepsy, a friend told me about a book called One Thousand Gifts.  The author decided to try to record 1000 gifts from God in her daily life.  After reading the book, I started my own gratitude journal, keeping track of the gifts that God had given me the day before.

I have recorded at least one thing to be grateful for every day since then even when I didn’t feel like there were any.  While I have recorded considerably more than 1000 gifts, it hasn’t always been easy to do. Only now as I pull it out again do I even realize there is a subtitle:

A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are

Not in a better place. Not tomorrow. Not when everything is good again.

Right now. Right where you are. Right in this pain. Live fully.

Simply waking up and breathing every morning are gifts, but I have been too angry many days to say “Thank You” for them.  They seem too minor a gift…yet they are truly the most important gifts I can receive because without them there are no more gifts.

I have tried to live gratefully every day since reading One Thousand Gifts.  I have struggled to live gratefully every day since Cody’s diagnosis.

While I have tried to focus on gratitude in the face of epilepsy, let me be clear:

I hate epilepsy.

I am not grateful for epilepsy.

I will do everything in my power to fight it for the rest of my life, even if Cody were miraculously healed today.

Deciding to be grateful

But on the day when Cody had a seizure, when he couldn’t talk and was dragging his right leg when he walked, when I had 3 EMS workers in my living room and an ambulance in my driveway, I could be grateful for:

• two of the EMS workers giving Cody a stuffed teddy bear they had brought in from the ambulance to distract him from my fear while the other worker talked to me about taking Cody to the doctor.

• our church being on my route home from the Urgency Room so I could stop and give them a prayer request for Cody, and the secretary hugging me when I started to cry and was shaking too much to be able to write out the request.

• a “sudden” cancellation at the neurology clinic for the very next day, a clinic that was only 20 minutes from our house.

On the day when the neurologist said, “Cody has epilepsy,” and I recalled a 24-year-old we knew whose brain had been destroyed by epilepsy, on the day my heart was shattered in two, I could be grateful for:

• the neurologist who just happened to have a cancellation was actually an epileptologist who himself had epilepsy.

• “an initial diagnosis of epilepsy that can be outgrown – not a more serious form, not cancer or a tumor, not something life threatening or causing brain damage.”

• a habit of reading my morning devotional email and finding words of promise to strengthen me that day.

I wrote one thing in my gratitude journal for the day after Cody’s diagnosis, one thing I could be grateful for in the pain and unknown:

“CODY”

“We can decide to be grateful or to be bitter.”

Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved