I traveled home, to Pennsylvania, the day after Christmas to see my father who is having health problems. Specifically, while undergoing a hip replacement, he had a minor stroke. Only 24 hours into my time here and I find it surreal. I am dining on feelings of sadness mixed with nostalgia being served with a side-portion of gratitude washed down with a tall glass of wonder. This morning I watched as my father began speech therapy. It is a time in which the therapist asked my father to describe objects and pronounce letters and words. I did not have the nerve to sit in the same room due to the sadness of seeing a once strong father pronouncing words like a child in phonics commercial. I found myself choking down deep feelings of sadness.

Later in the day, I drove with my mother through the town I spent some fantastic times as a child. I saw the tree I sat in eating green apples after smoking swisher sweet cigars trying to get the smell off my tongue. I may have gotten the smell off my tongue, but the green apples exacted its toll on my digestive system. I saw homes that were sitting where our neighborhood playground used to. I stopped the car across the street from the house I used to call home and looked at the renovations that the new owner had done. It is funny, but it really does not matter how much a person fixes up a home since it will never look good unless it looks the way it did when you were young. I devour a large helping of Nostalgia.

I then visited a friend named John who, while in his mid twenties, would take me along with a rough gang of friends camping during my 6th-8th grade years during the summer. John will never know how the memories of those days periodically drift through my mind like a cool breeze on a hot day. They were days of deep laughter and endless adventure. Today, my friend John has MS (multiple sclerosis) and he tells me it was not a good day. As he described to me numb limbs and painful aches, I am inundated by feelings of gratitude. I was not grateful for the sickness my friend is enduring, but gratitude to know that his mortality will be swallowed up by immortality one day. Maybe a day in the near future. John tells me the cost of the medicine will be expensive ($1200 to $1800 a month) and since he is self-employed, fear has become a haunting companion. But, I have gratitude as John expresses the richness of drawing close to God while his body begins to revolt against his wishes.

As I drove home, I commented to my mother of the wonder I feel at how God has directed me in my life through no plan or forecasting that I could do, but out of a sheer desire for me to know Him. Do I deserve what I have? No. Did I orchestrate the joy of having an incredible wife and 6 fantastic kids? Hardly. Do I not realize that at any time my life could be torpedoed by some life changing circumstance? Absolutly. However, I simple enjoy the silence of the drive home and the roar in my mind of the overpowering feeling of wonder at the grace of God.