Previous Challenge Entry (Level 1 – Beginner)
Topic: Joy (05/18/06)
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TITLE: Completely Alive | Previous Challenge Entry
By Peggy Mc Intyre
05/23/06 -
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On the seventh day the fever and paralysis went away. There did not seem to be any direct connection between the treatments they were administering and the disappearance of the symptoms. When the fever left I developed pneumonia and had to remain in the hospital for another three weeks. The doctors finally had something they knew how to treat. They debated as to whether it might be possible that my symptoms where just an unusual presentation of the onset of the pneumonia. In the end they decided that the pneumonia was most likely a result of their treatments and they recorded the cause of the fever and paralysis as psychosomatic.
I remember only a few snapshot-like moments from the time of the fever. During most of that time I was delirious. Oddly, I remember even less about the three weeks that I was recovering from pneumonia. However, what I remember absolutely vividly was walking into our backyard the day I finally left the hospital and got to return home.
It was shortly before Christmas. I had spent Thanksgiving in the hospital and was quite concerned that I might still be there for Christmas as well. We were living in Del Rio, Texas at the time. I walked in the front door of our house and went straight through to the backyard letting the screen door slam behind me. I stood in the middle of the yard with my arms outstretched overwhelmed with wonder. The sky was the bluest blue I had ever seen. The grass was so vividly green that the color seemed on the verge of bursting out into the air. Everything was achingly pristine and sharp. The air was unimaginably sweet. When I read Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories about the world ‘being new and all’ this is the moment I think of because it was as though I had stepped into the moment of creation.
C.S. Lewis in his book Surprised by Joy describes this as joy. That was the emotion, if you can justly call it ‘emotion’, that I felt at that moment. I felt more completely alive and vibrant than I had ever felt before and have only experience a few times since. It was as though a veil had been lifted for a moment and I could see life coursing through every aspect of creation including me and I was filled with rapturous delight in all of my senses.
The experience lasted only a moment really though that moment felt endless at the time. Life does not present us with many such moments of pure joy and delight. Indeed, my life has had only a very few. However, I am confident that when I leave this world for the next that I will find that these moments are but tiny glimpses of what we will experience for eternity. It is that confidence that allows me to look toward eternal joy instead of fruitlessly trying to recapture that fleeting moment of joy experienced in the past.
“Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind, and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Philippians 3:13-14 (NASB)
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I wonder if you wrote this as a fictional story with diaglogue if the impact would be even greater.
Nice work.