the kingdom where I dwell.It is a place where injustice and discouragement do not exist. A place where people are honest and genuinely wish each other's best. I am a day dreamer, an eternal optimist and nothing seems to have stopped me from being so. When my mother was first diagnosed with cancer, I sat in the oncologist's study with her, my father and a doctor friend of ours. The oncologist was somehow brutal in his diagnosis of the case: two months of life expectancy if not cured, chemotherapy, nauseous states, invalidity, bone marrow transplant, more therapy, hair loss. Any sane person would have been disconcerted, to say the least. My dad grabbed my mother's hand and held it tight, mother had tears in her eyes, our friend asked loads of worrying questions. I sat in the corner, in my green coat; I smiled a reassuring smile. I smiled a reassuring smile knowing in my heart it was all going to be alright. The issue is that I smile all the time. I am no idiot, right? It is just that it f
eels like, in extreme situations especially, I am overwhelmed with an exceptional steadfastness and inner strength which enable me to react promptly and efficiently to the problem. When we were in Kenya last summer a friend of mine badly hurt his hand. Though a grown man, he got scared he may not be able to move his hand again… I got a little scared too. In a second reached him, pulled off the cloth that was over my shorts and rapped it around his bleeding hand. Held his hand and reassured him that ‘everything was going to be alright’. Eventually he was; so was my mother. And I wonder whether my great sense of Hope comes exactly from that sense of confidence in a divine providence whereby, even when the outcome of a given situation is not that we would have hoped for, I know there is a much bigger plan in a much wider spectrum of Grace. And on this warm summer night, I am well and truly into my anatomy textbook, carried by dreams of Hope, inspired by Grace, surrounded by Love in an unending realm of possibility where dreams, reality, impossibility, surrealism and, why not, a wee touch of madness create a unique mystic fragrance that makes me smile…even in a stormy day.
