Gratitude and the Stomach Flu

This past Sunday morning, I woke up with the stomach flu. It was actually one of those situations where I knew something was wrong even before I was fully awake, and once I had woken up completely, my body began the many-houred ordeal of ridding itself of every particle of food and ounce of liquid I had ingested over the last 24 hours. I won’t go into too much detail, but let’s just say it’s going to be a long time before I eat cheesy nachos again.

With this onset came a radical change in my perspective and what was important to me. Just the day before, I had made a long list of plans for the coming week, which included all kinds of cleaning and organizing projects, errands to run, things to read, e-mails to send, people to get together with, etc. By 10:00 am Sunday morning, my biggest goal was to make it from my bathroom floor to the sink and then back to my bed. It took several minutes of prepping myself—of visualizing the route, of short panting breaths and, I’m embarrassed to admit, a few pitiful moans—and then I did it. As I was washing my hands and rinsing out my mouth, my vision started fading to black and a roaring filled my ears. Having passed out while sick in the past, I knew the signs and began a quick stagger to my bed, which I flung myself at just as the blackness and roaring overtook me. Seconds later, it began to recede, and I slowly became aware of a number of things. I became aware of the softness of my bed under my sprawled limbs, of the bright sunlight filtering through the curtains of my window, and the cheerful chirps of birds breakfasting in the yard outside. And I was suddenly filled with the most profound gratitude for the comfort and encouragement of those things.

My incapacitated physical state magnified even the very smallest elements into the greatest and most wonderful luxuries to me. For example, how wonderful that cell phones exist and I could actually have a phone in bed with me and reach numerous people at the touch of a button without even sitting up. How wonderful that I had a CD player nearby with a remote control. As my fever kicked in, I closed my eyes in relief from the cooling breeze that wafted down from my ceiling fan. Who invented ceiling fans anyway? Fantastic. Genius. And buckets. Buckets are amazing.

I also spent a fair amount of time marveling at the beauty of friends who will go to the grocery store and buy Gatorade and soda crackers (thanks, Diana) and leave them on your front porch and talk to you on the phone from your own front porch because you’re too weak to get to the front door to let them in. And neighbors who will roll out your brimming garbage cans for trash collection the next day and put them neatly back. And, after a few more hours had passed and I was finally able to retrieve the grocery bag off the front porch, the indescribable sweetness of those first few sips of Fruit Punch Gatorade and lime seltzer over ice that I was able to swallow and keep down (don’t ask my why this combo worked—it just did).

On day two, I graduated to gratitude and joy at being able to take a short shower (oh, what bliss to wash my hair!), eat soda crackers and soup, and swallow an ibuprofen to help the backache my fever was causing. I could sit up! I could enjoy watching TV! It was great.

By day three, the fever and nausea had gone completely, and I was left with only an overwhelming fatigue and a lack of appetite. I found myself restless and anxious as I lay on the couch watching TV. My mind raced with all the things I needed to do, and I began to grow impatient and frustrated with my lack of energy and all the time I was wasting. As I turned off the TV in petulant disgust and railed against my situation, I suddenly realized that not only had the fever and nausea gone away, but so had my gratitude. The more “well” I was becoming, the more I was taking for granted, and the more I was able to do, the more ungrateful and demanding I was becoming.

Last week, while having dinner at a friend’s, I had told her about my experience attending my niece’s recent singing competition. Towards the end of the concert, the host had briefly interviewed last year’s youth winner, a bubbly, vivacious teen who was very obviously eager to witness for Christ. I smiled indulgently along with the rest of the audience at her comments until she got to the part where she gushed about the opportunity she’d had to open for Randy Travis during his local concert, and how that “totally was the work of Jesus Christ.” At this, I couldn’t resist leaning over to my sister-in-law and whispering, “That’s so awesome that Jesus got her Randy Travis! Think he could score me a couple of Coldplay tickets?” After sharing this anecdote with my friend, we began to talk about what exactly the difference was between a Vending Machine God mentality and a genuine gratitude for every good gift, and the conclusion we came to was that the difference lay in the definition of “good gift.” A good gift, my friend pointed out, could be humility or patience. It could be the strength to endure a terrible loss. It might be something we want, but often it is something we don't want, want being irrelevant to need.

A good gift can be the stomach flu.

I definitely have no wish to revisit that experience anytime soon, but I realize that it literally stopped me in a way I needed to be stopped. It forced me to live entirely in the present moment and to be aware of and grateful for the ways in which my most basic needs were met and cared for, the ways these needs are met and cared for on an hourly and daily basis that I never give a second thought to and that I take for granted in the worst of ways—by being completely oblivious to them.

As day three taught me, it is all too easy to lose perspective, to forget what you’ve just experienced, and to slide back into old habits and ways of thinking. The activity and busyness of my days are slowly ramping up again, and I know I’ll lose my way again. Probably by this afternoon. But for the moment, I am grateful once again—that I have a Father who gives good gifts, gifts that shake me up now and then and get me to stop and pay attention in spite of myself.