on bonus time

Two years ago today, I was cured of breast cancer.

While singing in the shower this morning, standing in the exact spot where I first felt that deadly butterbean under my skin, I had a mind-bending thought:   "I have now lived past the time when I would have died without the mastectomy, without the miracle." 

"From here on," I thought, "I'm living on bonus time."  

Then it hit me:  What am I thinking?  I've been on bonus time from the moment I was born.


I pause now to marvel at the stillness of cataclysms.

Sometimes an ordinary and unremarkable moment turns out to be an axis whack that re-tilts the world.  You smile at a stranger, you hand someone a cup of coffee, you turn left instead of right, and silently the tectonic plates beneath your life slide and lock, forever rearranging all your future calendars like geologic columns churning in a tremor.  Nothing will ever be the same, but you don't know that yet.  The world moved, and there you are just whistling away, raking leaves, brewing tea, turning a page. 

By my doctors' reckonings, there was a moment over a decade ago when a single cell in my breast quietly went haywire.  Whatever I saw happening in my life that day was nothing at all like what God saw happening in my life that day.  But He did see.  And He saw what I did not.  Which is just as well since the cells of my body fall under His sovereignty, not mine.  Thank goodness for that. 

We see through a glass darkly: there is not one moment of our lives that is exactly what it seems.

But God, who is omniscient in every moment of time, omnipowerful in every moment of time, omnipresent in every moment of time, the God who consecrated both space and time, is Lord over moments. 

All time is a consecrated gift. 

Which means that all of us are living on bonus time.


I find this terribly exhilirating.  Do you?