My daily grat for today will be Charles D, one of our Northaven members, who had surgery today. The surgery of a church member seems like a bizarre daily gratitude. But I think it will make sense in a moment.

See, we had something really crappy happen last night. We were broken into. Somewhere between midnight, when we went to bed, and 6:30, when I got up to go to Charles’ surgery at Baylor, somebody threw a big rock through the window of our study/music room.

Several friends have asked me why/how we didn’t hear anything. Basically, the house is “ranch style” and the rooms are as far apart from each other as you can get.

Anyway, it was a mess. And a big shock. And then we realized things were missing. Specifically, my laptop and my wallet. The really creepy thing is that it was highly unlikely that anyone could have done this *prior* to last night, because there was stuff blocking the windows.

But since we’re having some work done in the rooms (new flooring…new paint…) I had moved almost everything off the desk earlier in the day. So, it was literally the first night that anybody could have smashed the window and grabbed the stuff. (The whole event was probably as quick as a “smash and grab” on your car…)

Most folks I’ve talked to today have been sorry that I lost the wallet. Actually, I could care less about that. What I’m really gonna miss is my laptop.

That thing had really become a part of my life. I used it for church. I used it for the band. I used it to record my own music.

This last one was the first thing thought of. I’ve recently multi-tracked four new songs and, yes, I failed to back up any of it. I do have *one* copy of the masters, as they stood last week. I guess that’s all there is now.

What a loss….

So, I spent the day calling pawn shops, insurance companies, credit card companies, meeting a police detective (no fingerprints…), and the glass repair guy.

It was painful, frankly.

I did get by to see Charles in the early morning, before his heart surgery; but I didn’t get back to the hospital until late in the afternoon, when he’d been transferred to a regular room.

Charles is in his early 80s. He’s a fixture of our church, and an incredibly wonderful guy. He volunteers at church once a week to answer the phones, compiles our visitor reports and puts out the visitors books each week, and does a ton of other stuff that we rely on.

Every time you ask him “how’s life?” he replies with “Better than the alternative…just happy to be here.”

And you get the sense that he really means it.

His surgery yesterday lasted several hours, and I expected to find him a bit groggy from anestesia in the afternoon. Far from it, he was chipper and animated…glad to see me and glad the surgery was over.

I asked him how he was doing/feeling about everything, and he put it all in very clear and sharp perspective. He described how he had been nervous prior to the surgery, but that he had kept reminding himself of something somebody had told him years ago.

“A friend once told me,” he said, “to always be grateful when your doctor says ‘We can operate.'”

I thought about that for a while, and what a great attitude this is to have. Hearing that you “need surgery” is something we often take as bad news. But is it? Isn’t it actually *good news* to know that, yes, you are in the care of medical professions and, yes, they think they can do something about it?

Isn’t hearing “We can operate” always “better than the alternative?”

I thought about this conceptual shift all the way home, as I mulled over our break-in from the night before.

Yes, it sucks to get my computer ripped off. Yes, it’s gonna be a pain to get everything in my wallet replaced and to gradually be reminded of the things lost off my computer.

But, yes, it’s “better than the alternatives.” We’re OK. The window is repaired.

And I can always get more stuff.

Thanks to Charles, for the daily gratitude/reminder of how sometimes how we look at things makes all the difference.

(During this year, my goal is to find something new to be thankful for every single day, and to add that thanksgiving as a blog entry, under the title “My Daily Gratitude.” I started this kick back around Thanksgiving, and it’s already resulted in a favorite new song of mine. The goal of this ongoing spiritual exercise is to see if doing such a thing might inspire even more gratitude within me, and to foster general awareness of life on a deeper level.)