Thanksgiving 2009 Top Ten List

On or around this official Day of Thanksgiving, 2009, I, Mike Evans, declare that I am thankful to God for:

10. The fact that I was able to receive the surgeries I needed before the President’s Health Care overhaul ambitions were codified.  I have to wonder if the  $600,000 or so this whole ordeal has cost our insurance company would have been approved under government plans currently being considered by Congress.  

9. Incremental daily improvements both neurologically and physiologically…Even after working out for six hours a week for the past 5 months with weights, elastic bands, cardio, jumping exercises, etc. I am still unable to do a single pull-up.  Using the machine at the gym I see that I am still 50 lbs. away from being able to do an unsassisted pull-up.  I have to laugh or I would cry.  The muscles on the right side of my body do not correspond to the effort I have put in to gain them back. I have a goal of being strong enough by Feb. 12, 2010 to do a single pull-up.  I’ll keep you posted. (For those of you who were wondering…before the surgeries I could do 9-10 pullups). 

8. Culvers concretes anyday…chocolate custard with Snickers mixed in thank you very much.

7. The Human Family… The sheer number of people, both Christian and otherwise who care and show concern,  is much higher than I had expected…or fully appreciated!

6. The support of my biological and extended family… How could we have made it through this past year without your support?  This is a rhetorical question. 

5. Church Family… Our dear Crossroad Church has been very supportive through this whole ordeal.  I couldn’t ask for a better church.  Well I could I guess…but I wouldn’t get it. 

4. The privilege of having endured a severe trial with our faith still intact.  We have now experienced in a visceral way what the Psalmist wrote in Psalm 34:8 “Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!  Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!”  We have now tasted and we have now seen that the LORD is good.

3. Karla my wife who has been my constant companion through hills and high waters.

2. Life (if not due to the manifold and amazing Providences of God and the skills of scores at the Mayo Clinic you probably would not be reading this right now as I most likely would no longer be among  the living). 

1. God Himself and the assurance of a future inheritance of a Kingdom that cannot be shaken and where all things are made new (Hebrews 12).

Happy Thanksgiving my dear friends and family!

(From a posting last November,  2008 Thanksgiving)

I am officially taking Thanksgiving Day off from this blog thing.   But before I do I wanted to make a top ten list of things that I am thankful for this year, in ascending order:

10.  Buffalo Wild Wings on Tuesdays

9.    Technologies and human beings that can repair things even in the human brain

8.    Yesterday

7.    Health Insurance

6.    Today

5.   People like you who care and pray…and leave comments: extended family, friends old and new…even strangers whom I have never met, yet who have jumped in the wagon with us on this journey.

4.   An amazing church family whom I love dearly and who reciprocate in manifest ways 

3.   The privilege of seeing and appreciating all of life through the grid of a heightened sense of my own mortality

2.   My wife and children: Karla, Luke, Benjamin, Elisabeth, Gabriella, and Jared.

1.   The future inheritance of a Kingdom that cannot be shaken; where all things are made new (Hebrews 12)

Happy Thanksgiving!