A Different View of Morning

I woke this morning to a beautiful day. The sky is infinite blue, the temperature is cool but mild, the wind, for a change, is calm. My calendar is full, but easy. I woke this morning to a beautiful day.

A friend of mine woke this day to his first round of chemotherapy. It is the first formal response to Friday's diagnosis -- one that turned out grimmer than we had hoped. I don't know how these things routinely work, but this almost immediate commencement of treatment wafts an odor of urgency. We first talked shortly after he returned from the doctor. I can't say what was going on in his gut, but his voice was matter-of-fact. We talked again on Saturday -- he had been putzing chores around the house. Again, matter-of-fact. Yesterday they were in church, he and his wife, in their usual pew, accomplishing their usual volunteer tasks, having their usual conversations. Well, not their "usual" conversations. "Have you heard?" I was asked a dozen times over the course of the morning. The conversations were hardly routine.

I was somehow impressed. I don't know what I expected -- it wasn't likely they were suddenly going to book a cruise or bolt the door and bunker down against the thought of it all. What else would they do but continue to do those things that had shaped and informed their living, and connect with those people from whom they routinely draw nourishment?

I woke this morning to a beautiful day -- exercise, promise, purpose, routine, and also to a day suddenly larger, stretched by mindful concern for someone whose own day has, in a way, exploded into unimagined dimensions. But as I think about it, we both woke to a day in which we find ourselves held in the embracing presence of one who's love and capacity are still larger.

He adds some new things to his routine: no longer simply the lawn to mow and a grandson to watch and a job to perform and a book to shelve, but needles and ominous bags of fluid, as well, and nurses and waiting to see; watching; inventorying every wince for symptoms. All those, and a familiar pew, and the book cart, and conversations over coffee and a cookie. Those simple things have, after all, provided shape and meaning and support and friends. And the faith that, whatever the efficacy of the chemo, he is alive in a way that the cancer is powerless to alter.