“Count your blessings, name them one by one,
Count your blessings, see what God has done!
Count your blessings, name them one by one,
Count your many blessings, see what God has done.’’ – Hymn (Count Your Blessings)

Prit – still going strong!

“I’m going to town to price a windshield for the jeep and then to Petite-Anse to find the man who installs them.” I gazed at my husband for the thousandth time in wonder. There was a season when I would have shuddered if Prit even left the room a-l-o-n-e. If I couldn’t see him in the flesh, that old, familiar panic would rise up within me and threaten to paralyze me with fear. If he lingered a little too long in the bathroom, my imagination would run wild with visions of him blacked out on the floor. After all, it was on the bathroom floor he was found after suffering from an almost fatal brain aneurysm in July 2010.

It is now May 2016 and we’re moving quickly toward July. July 4th will mark six years since that harrowing time in Canada when it looked like I just might return to North Carolina with my husband in a box — or at least (as the Haitians say) “kokobé.” *

I nodded my head to him in acknowledgement. As I watched him gathering together his things, I recalled the day he woke up from his 26-day coma. Prit couldn’t even remember my name. He couldn’t even remember his name – although his furrowed brow showed he was desperately trying to recall it. And, here he was on his way alone to take care of business across town which meant driving through insane traffic that operates by jungle rules.

“Ok, honey, I’ll see you later,” I said. A rush of joy surged through my being. Watching him exit the room, I thought to myself, “We’ve come a long way….”

Of all the things that have wearied, irritated, and exasperated me today, I find that when I look for a reason to count my blessings, I can usually discover them right in front of me. We all have things that threaten to sabotage our peace. For me, here are just a few. An insanely slow internet at home. An even slower one at the hotel. The Haitian heat returning with a vengeance as if to say, “Ha Ha, and you thought you were rid of me!” Yet, when I rein in my thoughts and return to what one author calls her “happy place,” I’m reminded of how much worse my life could have been if the summer of 2010 had yielded a different crop.

You can read the rest of the story in my book, Into the Storm. What are you thanking God for today? Are you counting your blessings…. one by one? You’ll find something for which to be thankful….

*kokobé: crippled; to the point of not being able to care for one’s self; incapacitated