Nothing like a few enforced stay in bed days to help you get perspective. In my case it was 'arterial fibrulation" or some medical term spelled similarly. I woke up around 6a.m. on Sat. morning with my heart beating over 190 beats per min. It should be somewhere between 70 - 90. I checked into the hospital where they kept me for a couple of days. So there I was, on my back, hooked up to a million machines (ok, 3) just lying there. Not much to do when you're stuck in the hospital. I read a bunch of magazines - a few times each, talked as much as I could to the lady in the same room as me, and the rest of the time - well, I guess it was perspective time.

I realized how unimportant most of the things that I find myself "busy" with are. I found myself thinking about the plans that I'd made that weren't getting done - and shock of all shocks, the earth didn't quit spinning! I thought of how I longed to be with Reid & Caris & Phoebe. How just to hang out with them, laugh with them, spending time talking and sharing - how these were the things that I craved.

I thought about why I was here. Why did God allow me to live - what was it that He wanted to accomplish through me and was I letting Him use me. And in my own, albeit unprofound way I thought these thoughts expressed perfectly in 1951 by Samuel Howard Miller.

It is the rare person who, looking back over his life and seeing what he has done to it, hasn't sighed for a chance to redeem what he has cheaply used or carelessly ruined. If only somehow, somewhere, there was a way to live again the days we have darkened with our blind haste - the innumerable occasions when our indifference trod on all the pearls of God’s graciousness; the times when our pride, or our fear, or our meanness poured the acid of contempt over the fair countenance of another’s soul! If this grace were ours, how we would leap to the chance!

May I not take for granted any longer the grace offered to me.