One Day at a Time

The day I left for Nashville to see one of my old friends Fritz and his son Edward early Monday morning it was packed with fear at what I might find. Edward, his six-year-old son, was in a rehabilitation unit of Vanderbilt Hospital after a television fell on his head. Edward was out of Intensive Care and had been moved to a rehab unit but was not fully awake. I thought, whoever actually knows what is going on with a severe head trauma? When I walked into the room, Fritz met me with a grin and said, "We are out of the valley of sorrow and into the joy of morning." I wept. Edward was on the hospital bed asleep and had it been another setting, Fritz would have seemed like a proud father showing his sleeping baby to an old friend.

We chatted and shared horror stories about the dangers of living in a fallen world and how venerable our hearts are when we have children. Then Edward awoke. He tried to stand up in the bed and then began to pee on himself and soil the sheets. We both held him up and Fritz said through his laughter, "Go on, son, just get it all out. I need to give you a bath anyway." Then he picked him up gently and put him on the floor and said, "Watch this!" He let go of his little boy for him to take a few steps like a drunken man just waking up, and then he laughed and said, "Can you believe that? He is starting to walk again!" Fritz then asked me to help give him a bath. I washed hair and soaped away while he hosed him down with the hand-held showerhead. A few days earlier, Edward's family wondered when he would ever gain consciousness and here he was mumbling a few words and standing up in the shower. You would have thought Edward had just been accepted to Harvard by the joy radiating from his dad.

The process of life has a way of teaching us. Watching Fritz with Edward and facing with him the trauma we have both felt with our children over the last couple of weeks, I shared with him what I was learning and that was now being demonstrated in watching Fritz with his little boy. In one way, recovering alcoholics have a big advantage over us -- they live one day at a time. They know they are one drink from disaster, one drink from slipping back into an illusion of self-protection created by booze. One day at a time, grace to live one day, and with that accomplished, there breathes the success. Instantly gone are the illusions of control and power and of thinking that we somehow have command over our lives and the lives of those we love.

Living one day at a time is the hardest thing for self-sufficient people to do. Frequently, plans, appointments and events crowd out the ability to live in the present. Actually to be in the moment often escapes us and the joy of what is happening sifts through our hands. Or we demand perfection from everything and everyone for us to have joy and then, because nothing ever is perfect, we live with the dissatisfied frustration. Instead, we lose sight of what can be ours by merely drinking in a day of mercy, with a measure of grace. In the book, A Stained White Radiance by James Lee Burke, Dave Robicheaux is a middle-aged detective in New Iberia, La. A recovering alcoholic and without any illusions, he realizes his inability to cope with life without grace beyond himself. In his middle age years his dreams come true when he marries his childhood sweetheart named Bootsie, only to discover she has lupus. This eats away at his soul. She has good days and bad days but after they change her medicine he finds her on a really good day, "Only an hour ago," he says, "I had looked up from my work and caught her in a moment when she was unconscious of my glance, just as though I clicked the camera lens and frozen her in the pose of the healthy and unworried woman that I prayed she would become again for both of us."

After pondering her in the bloom of health, it hit him like revelation why he was so unhappy and in doing so puts his finger on much of our discontent: "At that moment I realized the error of my thinking about Bootsie. The problem wasn’t in her disease, it was in mine. I wanted a lock on the future; I wanted our marriage to be above the governance of mortality and chance; and, most important, in my nightly sleeplessness over her health, and the black fatigue that I would drag behind me into the day like a rattling junkyard, I hadn’t bothered to be grateful for the things I had." He was so concerned about what rested outside his control that he lost the vision of a "present grace." He was losing sleep, becoming frazzled, anxious and so concerned about what the future held, he couldn’t see and enjoy the beauty of the daily blessing of his wife.

On the way home from my visit to Nashville, I realized I had been on holy ground. There was a father, not thinking about where his son would be in three months, or six months; circumstances and tragedy had made those things meaningless. He just knew that here was his boy, brought back as one from the dead and feeble though his steps may be, his grin shy, and though his hold on his toy light saber was a little shaky, this was all gift and grace.

One day at a time is all we are promised anyway, none of us have a lock on the future and certainly anxiety rises when we begin to think we are "above the governance of mortality and chance." When will we ever learn? Like Dave Robicheaux, we neglect so much in an ordinary day to be thankful for. Because of this we are less significant than we could be and the tragedy exists not only in that we are robbed of joy, but we crush the possibility to be vessels of blessings to those around us.