A Spring of Joy

The past week has been a difficult one for me as I have pondered my recent hospital stay. For those of you who don’t know what happened, I got a horrible skin infection in my weak arm… the one where the lymphatic system is compromised because so many nodes were removed with my cancer. The biggest struggle? (Deep breath!) Realizing I could have died last weekend. The infectious disease specialist told me that if I had waited much longer (and I didn’t wait long at all), it would have moved into blood poisoning and possibly then to my heart and brain. Y’all, it has completely freaked me out, so much so that I sat in the hospital and wrote out what songs and verses I wanted at my funeral, because my poor Brian has so much on his plate that he shouldn’t have to figure that out, too.

Trust me. It scared me. A lot. Over the past months as I have battled breast and thyroid cancer, I have had to face my mortality over and over and over. I’ve been asked probably 5 times in the last 5 months, “Do you have a living will?”

I have had to come to terms with how fragile life is.

But I have also been given the amazing opportunity to see just how faithful God is.

And I have thought a lot about how I’m living life. Am I making it count? Am I being a woman of influence?

John Piper said, “What choices will you make today that will give you the most pleasure a million years from now?”

Wow.

I’ve been taking a lot of inventory of my life and how I live. Is it in integrity? Am I a woman of my word? Am I honoring Christ with the way I speak and act? Am I more concerned with what others think of me than what God thinks of me?

I can’t change my past. I can learn from it. I can move forward knowing that He has the date and time of my death fixed, and I find great security in that. My future may be unknown to me, but it is KNOWN to Him, and because of that, I can LIVE.

The truth of the matter with this is that I will fail. I won’t make every second count, and if the focus is on making every second count, I will drive myself (and everyone around me) crazy. The focus must be on living to glorify God in my choices, and that will change my perspective from a focus on self to a focus on Him.

I ask myself. Is what I am doing today rooted in what I will gain today? Or is it rooted in the things that will last forever?

And what am I doing today? I am shopping with my children. I am eating lunch with my Mom and littles. I am reading books and playing games. I am de-cluttering my house, doing laundry, and preparing for a visit from my in-laws. I am making a belated birthday cake for my hubby.

They matter. They matter because even in these very temporal things, I am enjoying the treasures God has given me here on earth. The laughter of children window shopping for toys. The smiles of a little redhead sipping through a straw. The joy of time together. The smell of fresh laundry and cleaning supplies remind me of the beauty of being clean… clean in Christ. The scent of chocolate fudge cake and sharing in the joy of my Brian, my gift. These are things that matter.

And God is being glorified. And in a million years, will it matter that God was glorified in my home today?

I think the answer to that is a very resounding, “Yes.”