The Woman Who Thanks God for Tuesdays

Margaret Chen was fifty-three when the oncologist in Portland gave her eight months. That was six years ago.

She'll tell you about the morning she woke in the ICU after her third surgery, tubes everywhere, unable to speak. A nurse had taped a card to the bedrail from her granddaughter: "Nana, God isn't done with you yet." Margaret read those words through a morphine fog and something shifted inside her.

Today she volunteers at that same hospital, pushing a cart of books through the oncology ward. She has a habit that puzzles the staff. Whenever anyone asks how she's doing, she gives the same answer: "Grateful. Especially on Tuesdays." Her diagnosis came on a Tuesday. So did her remission, years later. "The worst day and the best day of my life fell on the same weekday," she says. "Now I know — any day can be the day the Lord turns everything around."

The psalmist understood this. He had been shoved to the very edge: "I was pushed back and about to fall, but the LORD helped me." He had stared into darkness and survived. And from that survival came not bitterness but a song: "This is the day the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it." Those words are not the breezy optimism of someone untested. They are the hard-won thanksgiving of a soul who walked through the valley and discovered that the Almighty's steadfast love endures — on the worst Tuesdays and the best ones alike.