Posts Tagged ‘birthdays’

Last night, I completed my 43rd year on the planet.

I’m disgusted.

No, I take that back.  I’m moderately disappointed.  I thought I’d be more than I am, after this long.  To quote Kathleen Kelly from You’ve Got Mail, “I lead a small life – well, valuable, but small – and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven’t been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

I still can’t watch the scene from that movie where she closes her little store without tears running down my face.  I’ve had to do that, to kill something I loved because to keep it alive was to cause it suffering to no purpose.  I’ve survived almost nine years in the mortgage industry, but our modest and occasional successes have not really filled in the holes left by the much more frequent times things were bad.  We’ve done okay.  I call it “moderately unsuccessful”.  We have done good, quality work and helped a lot of people that wouldn’t otherwise have been served, but we’ve never managed to make a real success of it.  Very recently, the good work I thought I was doing, in an area I thought I was good at, turned out not to be valued by people I consider my friends.  That hurt a good deal, and still does.

Most everything else in my life is better than that, but again, I’m so far short of excellence in so many areas.  The fact is that I haven’t even reached for excellence.  I treat my wife well, and we love each other, but couldn’t I be better?  I’m a good father to my many children, but every softball season I’m reminded that I haven’t had a catch with any of my kids…ever.  In a thousand little ways, practically every day, I’ve put them second and third and eighteenth.  I pray, but not as hard as I could.  I read the scriptures every day, but they slide past my eyes without impression.  I write, but I don’t dare to try doing it for money.  What if I’m not as good as I think I am?

As I consider this, though, I’m reminded of a quote by C.S. Lewis, one of my favorites: The real test of being in the presence of God is that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether.

Now, I find myself in the presence of God quite a lot.  I invite Him here, and I try to welcome Him when He comes.  My wife and children, and so many of my friends, are among His greatest warriors, and their presence invites His.  So I see myself as a small, dirty object extremely often.  But then, the truth of it is that if we are honest, we all do.  We all know we’re not what we could be.  We all know we could be doing better than we are.

The key for me today and all days is to forget myself altogether.  Since I can’t stop myself from thinking – I’ve tried, and it only works when I’m watching Michael Bay movies – I had better get in the habit of thinking about you instead.

So happy birthday to you!

Are birthdays magic?  Well, if you ask a four-year-old, they are.  My little son Nathaniel (“Thanner”) talks about his birthday pretty much all the time, despite the fact that it won’t come ’round until next May.  He tells you how old he is.  Tells you he’s almost five.  Tells you what he wants to do.  Tells you it’s next week.  Every day.

What is it about birthdays that we love?  Sunday is the birthday of the country I love best.  We celebrate this birthday with fireworks and barbecues and sixteen straight hours of World War II movies.  The biggest holiday of the year is the celebration of the birthday of Jesus Christ.  We have Washington’s birthday, and Martin Luther King’s birthday, and a dozen others.  We all remember the birthday of our marriages (we call them anniversaries, but they’re birthdays sure enough).  I remember every year the birthday of my career in lending in Utah (it’s the end of October).  We, as humans, love birthdays every bit as much as Thanner does.

Today is my forty-second birthday.  It certainly seems magical to me.  I have had already birthday greetings from a one-time prom date that I haven’t seen in many years (hi, Yvette!), from a kindred spirit that I met in Rome 25 years ago (Leslie, God bless you), and from an old girlfriend that now lives with her family in Australia (Jillyn, my dear friend).  And dozens of others.  I slept wonderfully last night for the first time in a good while.  I went to the gym this morning and I’ve lost weight again.  This morning my son Nicholas starts for the first time at point guard for his high school team.  The sun is shining, and the garden looks great.  My wife still loves me.

Many of those things were or have been true for a while, so perhaps it’s just that I’m noticing them more today.  But I am noticing them, and that’s part of the magic of the day for me.

For Thanner, I think part of the day’s magic – perhaps, in fairness, most of the magic – is the presents.  That faded for me a long time ago.  I can’t even tell my long-suffering wife what I’d like to eat for my birthday dinner.  It’s just not very important to me.  But there are birthday things that are important to me.  I like to know that I’m a better person than I was a year ago.  I like to rededicate myself to improving, to becoming better yet.  Birthdays are very good for that.  That’s a gift I give, not that I get, but I’ve noticed that I look forward far more to giving than to getting, anyway.

Every day I get the gift of a new life.  As a Christian, and a sinner (aren’t we all?), I make mistakes every day, and every day I need the grace of Jesus Christ to reach into the broken places in my soul and put things to rights.  I need Him to make things right for others when I hurt them.  He always does.  This is called, in Christian parlance, being “born again”.  So in that sense, every day is my birthday.  Every day is a new chance to be what I really want to be, what I am meant to be.

In the spirit of that, I am going to commit the gaucherie of asking for gifts today.  What I want is this: do something, no matter how small, to move forward one of those I-always-wanted-to’s that you have stored up.  You know the ones I mean.  “I’ve always wanted to write a novel” or “I’ve always wanted to go skydiving” or “I’ve always wanted to see a Broadway show.”  Whatever it is, do something to make it happen.  That’s what I want.  If you’d like to come back here and tell me what it was that you did, that would be great, but it isn’t critical.  Just do it.  Go the whole day without snapping at anyone.  Be cheerful in the face of certain disaster.  Become just a little bit more of the person you know you were meant to be.  Be born again yourself.

Let the magic begin!  Happy birthday to all of us!