Waking up alive

The last few days have been somewhat stressful. I found out last week that my Grandfather, aged 88, was in hospital with pneumonia. It turned out it wasn't pneumonia, it was a problem with a valve in his heart which was blocking and meant he was getting fluid in his lungs. The only way to fix it was via open heart surgery, otherwise his life expectancy was 6 months to a year.

The surgery went ahead yesterday. I should point out here that my grandfather lives 3000 miles away in New Hampshire so I didn't get to see him before surgery. Well, after not being able to get to sleep, and waiting up late last night to see if there was any e-mail from the family in the US to say how the operation went, I awoke up at quarter to six to find out that the operation went very well and grandpa was awake and happy.

That lead to a few happy tears and a big thankyou to God. I'd been praying that I'd be able to see him again, and I'd got all my friends at church to pray for him too. Well, God is Good.

That wasn't the only thing that was going on either. I had to leave work with a terrible migraine on Tuesday, my body's way of saying it can't cope. (I drove home too, and thanks only to God I didn't get into any accidents and wasn't even sick in my car). And then on Tuesday evening a close friend was rushed to hospital. Thank God, it turned out it wasn't anything serious, but they didn't know that at first.

I gather that when some people have hard times, they ask, where is God in all this? But for me it's the opposite. When things are at their worst, when even the simple task of getting from one day to the next is too much to contemplate, that's when I most appreciate God. When everything else goes bad, God is all I have left to cling to, as he alone never lets me down. Thank you Jesus!