Grace and Gratitude

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I couldn’t sleep this morning because today is my diagnostic mammogram and my mind is full of “what if’s”. I checked my e-mail and found a beautiful note of encouragement from my dear friend Kizzie who was the chaplain at the hospital where I got my first cancer diagnosis fourteen years ago. She came to my room then and said, “I heard you had some bad news. Can I sit with you?” She did just that. Sat with me. She gave me the gift of grace then and gave it to me again today. She assured me that I am being “held in the light”.

I like the image of light. Lon Robertson spoke at our church service last week and said that evil is the absence of goodness just as light is the absence of darkness. Is it any wonder I love the light whether it’s the sun shining in my garden, a dancing fire in the fireplace or the glow of a candle—light pleases me.

There is something in my breast, near my incision site. Some little mass that doesn’t feel like a lump but doesn’t feel like normal tissue either. I’m hoping its just scar tissue. Mostly, I’m hoping that I will face whatever the news is today with grace and gratitude and I know that Chuck will be there with me to celebrate or comfort me.

Of course my hope is for a clean bill of health but I want to remember to stay in the present. We only get one day at a time and I too often forget that and sink into a stew of regret and angst that I haven’t made more of what time I have had. I have no power to change the past and no control over the future but I can deal with today. How I do that is up to me. Grace and gratitude. That’s the key. I am in God’s hands.

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