Birthday Break

 

We pause, take a commercial break, from our regularly scheduled programming of the Sermon on the Mount because it is my 50^th birthday.  I am now eligible for membership in AARP.  Insert confetti thrown here, I guess?  I am sure some of you are think, “He is still so young.” Which I do appreciate, because the wider culture suggests that I am over the hill. I do know that I am reaching or have reached the halfway point in my career.  I do know that I get tired more easily, and this will only continue.  I do know the culture keeps preaching and teaching me that I should thrive in my fifties, the best decade ever, without ever accepting or acknowledging that my body is finite and has a “best buy” date on it.  Birthdays are filled with all kinds of emotions that we can’t frost over or drowned out by belting “Happy Birthday”.  Birthdays are moments to look back, look around, and look forward.  Maybe you remember the day you turned 50.  Or just consider your most recent birthday.  One of the beautiful tensions in our faith is the unique universality we individually share.  I hope you caught the contradictory tension in that last sentence.  You are unique and you are a featherless biped like me.  Or in other words, what you felt on your 50^th Birthday (gratitude to grief; surprise – how did I get to this age so soon to some regret to much rejoicing) may be similar and different to what I feel today as well.  If I had a magic wand (which that would be a fantastic birthday present), I would cast a spell to eliminate the phrase, “I know exactly how you feel.”  We share grief in a larger sense, but how we process that pain is as unique as your fingerprint.  We share celebrations with laughter or warm feelings, but how your soul dances with the divine bares only your name.  More and more I realize that life/faith is a wayless way.

Today, I welcome your prayers.  Today, I invite you to pause to ponder ~ you, like me, have never been this age before.  Which makes me wonder, why do we think we will ever arrive at some magical destination of having life together?  Today, I invite you to live your one wild and precious life (thank you Mary Oliver for that blessing).  I pray in the month to come, as we begin the season of Lent on Wednesday, we will find faithful, creative, brave, and bold ways to live our belovedness.  I pray in the coming decade I will be willing to fall splat flat on my face with laughter at the joy of making beautiful mistakes for the love of God.  May God bless you and keep you in these hard, holy days.  Amen.