The hand of Jesus is the hand which rules our times.
He regulates our life clock. Christ is for us and Christ is in us.
My times are in His hand.

E. PAXTON HOOD

A long about the time I conspired to lay this book to rest, my mother sat bolt upright in her hospital bed one evening, smiled widely at me, and asked, “What day is it? Where’s Ramona?” It was like we were in a Sandra Bullock movie and she’d just wakened from a deep coma. I was shocked. Mom, talking in complete sentences.

Thinking it too good to be true, I held up one hand and asked, “How many fingers?”

She laughed. “Seven,” she said. “Call a doctor.”

Pulling a chair close, I leaned forward as she regaled me with stories long forgotten, naming names I hadn’t heard in years. I phoned my brother Dan with the news. “She’s even brighter than I,” I said.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he joked.

When I told Mom what he had said, she began laughing and hadn’t the energy to stop.

Nurses arrived to see if they should give her CPR, and she introduced them to me one by one, without even looking at their nametags. When they left, she whispered, “How much money do I have?”

I told her.

She grinned like she was a child again and was about to dip a schoolmate’s pigtails in an inkwell. “Let’s give it away,” she said.

Months have passed. The blanket near her bed is just a blanket now, no longer her baby. The Bible on her night table lies open; gone is the dust. I am married; no longer am I stealing her money. She grieves her husband’s death at times, knowing exactly when it happened, how many months ago, how many days.

Some nights I find her sitting at an old wooden table, writing notes in shaky handwriting—notes to friends and family, encouraging them with a story or a verse from Scripture. “God takes care of me,” she often says. “The nurses…they pray with me.” And they do. Sometimes I catch them. One whispered, “I’m a Christian. Your mother is such a blessing.”

I asked Mom what she would like, seeing as I hadn’t given away all her money quite yet.

“I don’t know,” she said, frowning like she was working on a math equation.

“What about a TV?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Nah. The best years of my life I spent without one.” Then her eyes lit up. “Shoes,” she said. “I need some shoes.”

The next day we decked her in her finest, wedged her into a wheelchair, and went out looking for some. I wish you could have seen her leaving the store with a shoebox on her lap. Her eyes danced, like a four-year-old who has just pulled the wrapping off a Christmas gift she didn’t dare dream of receiving.

“Thank you,” she kept saying. “Thank you.”

I suppose it is the one solitary characteristic that has most endearedher to her children through the years: thanksgiving. This spirit of thanksgiving ensures that several visitors crouch by her bed each day. Thanksgiving helps her focus not on what is missing but what remains. Not on what has taken place but what is yet to come.

Thankful people seem to remember blessings and forget troubles. They are quicker to accept than to analyze, to compliment than to criticize. Helen Keller thanked God for her handicaps. “Through them,” she wrote, “I have found myself, my work, and my God.”

I don’t know too many people who have more to gripe about than Mom. She has broken both hips in separate falls, lost her husband and her hearing and her freedom, yet she cannot find time in her schedule to gripe. It’s like she has stepped back a little farther than most of us, seeing the bigger picture, thinking not on what is wrong but on what God is making right. Grateful people don’t think less of themselves; they think of themselves less often.

“What are you thankful for today?” I sometimes ask her.

“Oh, so much,” she invariably says. “You. And food. I’m getting fat, you know. The food is much too good here. I’m so fat I don’t have a lap. I have laps.”

I guess my mother needs so little, but she needs that little so much. She needs my weekly visits and prayers. She needs updates from her grandchildren and Dad’s favorite dog to sit on her laps. She needs a good-night kiss and a kind word and a reminder of the hope we share: the hope of heaven.

These last few years have certainly given me a celestial whiff, a divine desire to count my days, to make the days count. To form each and every decision in light of eternity, mindful that our lives pass quickly but decisions made here last forever.

Thinking on Mom’s life, I have found myself saying a more profound prayer than “Help!” the last few days. It is “Thanks.”

Thank You, Lord, that the lines have fallen to me in pleasant places. Thank You that You are the God with a history of making all things new, of filling us with hope and joy. And thanks for allowing Your children the last laugh. Verses from Mom’s favorite book now open on her night table say it best:

We know that God, who raised the Lord Jesus, will also raise us with Jesus and present us to himself…. That is why we never give up. Though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day. For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever!… For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever. (2 Corinthians 4:14, 16-18, NLT)