Update: Counting Down or Counting Up?

Teach us O Lord to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom. Ps 90:12

I've mentioned the idea of numbering our days, several times on this blog. Last week, I found myself numbering my days during a six day hospital stay in Calgary. I mean literally numbering my hospital days. This hospitalization was to get me started on a new course of treatment with a drug that had potentially life-threatening side effects on the first doses*. During that hospital stay you could certainly find me counting down the days I had left in that fifth floor room. 4 more days if all goes well. 3 more days.... 2 more.... 

Counting down one's days, when it comes to a hospital stay, might work, but for me it is a dangerous strategy for life. This very well could be the last treatment they can find for me. Whether I want to or not, that leads me to speculate how many days I might have left. One night in the hospital I actually found myself thinking, "Well, that's one less day of remission and one day closer to the end."  I was counting down my life. I was seeing the day I had just lived as something to lament. 

I need to make sure I don't live the days I have left counting down. Instead, I want to live those days counting up. "God is giving me another day!?!  Amazing! Another day on top of the 23,750 ish days I have already been given? What a gift this day is!"

 I need to live each day not as a cross-off on a dwindling list but as a grace-filled add-on to the precious storehouse of days I've already been given both since the cancer diagnosis and long before. May God give us all hearts of wisdom so that we may live our days counting them up in amazement and thanksgiving.

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*Subsequent weekly doses will be given in Red Deer. It will be a month or two before the effectiveness of the treatment can be evaluated.