Energy Levels & Cell Phones

Ruth and I spent last week in Winter Park, Colorado. We helped our son, Dave Gibson, get Young Life's Crooked Creek Ranch ready to host 500 high school kids per week all summer. This is this fourth year in a row that we have participated in this annual Work Week. We joined 350 other adults, most of them from Kansas and Texas. Dave is Guest Services Director there. His wife, Brenda, runs the excellent camp store. This trip gave us time with four of our seven grandchildren, too.

I did not get sick! That breaks a string of sicknesses during the past two years there. Last year I was weak and dizzy most of the time with what we learned three weeks later was lymphoma. In 2001, I was knocked out by altitude sickness as if by flu. This year I loved the ability to do physical work daily at 9000 feet altitude with endurance like I had three years ago. That was a great measure of my recovery from cancer, and chemo, and pneumonia. I learned something about the gift of life.

I experienced the basic gift of life when I was sleeping most of March and April with pneumonia. As I began to bounce back from that, I discovered the second gift of life, which is the ability to reflect on being alive. Consciousness does not automatically go with life. It is a marvelous bonus from the hand of a Creator who desires us to follow in His footsteps of living creatively and with delight in sheer existence. The third gift of life is the amazing ability to move around. Until this past year I always thought the energy to stand on my feet and go where I wanted to was a birthright. Now I recognize it as an astounding extra that we do not easily come by. I rejoiced last week in carrying heavy loads uphill for hundreds of yards. I could not do that in March. Our God is an awesome God, who gives us good things that we only come to appreciate when we lose them for a while. God be with you.