My Birthday Was Today
My birthday was today...
I say "was" because it's literally 24 minutes before midnight and I waited to start typing this post until the very last possible minute... I'll have to post it the second I'm done to make sure it's posted in time, so bare with me if there's some grammatical errors... This one is just going to be a stream of consciousness I feel like...
Today started out feeling "off". Not like in a really bad way but you know that feeling like your whole world is tilted just a degree or two to one side and you can't quite wrap your finger around it (that phrase right there basically says it all)? That's how this day felt throughout most of it to be honest. I had a lot of people call and text and message and post about my birthday and it was so so sweet to have all that love flowing my way. So it wasn't that I didn't get a lot of love and gifts and kindness for my birthday... It just didn't feel like a birthday for some reason.
I was walking with Peyton to the library downtown which is a good 25-30 minute walk from our house and I was just trying to figure out what the matter was and why I just felt so "meh" on my special day - the day that signals the beginning of the new season God is uncovering in this new year of my life.
And the conclusion I came to in that moment was that I think I felt like 24 just sounded a little old to me (sorry to all my friends older than 24... just trying to be real here). And I was thinking about how age is such a big deal in our lives... We celebrate kids growing up a year and as a young child there is such hope and excitement surrounding that event. But as we get older, the celebration starts to fade into a realization that each new birthday celebration is really becoming more of a marker for how close we are to the end of our story here on earth rather than a connection to our beginning...
And I think the reason birthdays start to have this growing ache inside them as we get older is because we are eternal beings living inside temporal shells right now and the very reality that we are growing older and nearing death is completely paradoxical to our original design that we almost don't know how to face it cognitively.
We were never meant to grow old and die. We were made to live forever and the truth is that we will live forever... The Fall just broke our physical world so badly that God allowed us a way to exit this temporal reality into a realm of existence so glorious we cannot comprehend it. It's only by His Grace that we didn't eat from the Tree of Life after we'd eaten from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil... If we'd been given the chance, we would have lived on this broken earth for all eternity - living in a world that continues to decay until the point of living in an eternal hell on earth...
But, since Adam and Eve chose the serpent's reality over our Father's, death has become a gracious doorway for us to leave this fallen place and enter into our true eternities that will never grow dim or fade...
I know that's all really really deep for a birthday post but, hey... why not right?
All I know is that I feel it... I feel the weight of time's sands passing like a torrent through my finger tips. I feel the reality setting in that time is short and what I choose today will echo forever into the realms of eternity.
And I truly think that the greatest gift I was given today was probably the realization, once again, that I don't have any time to spare on trivial things. There is only time for Just One Thing and if I do that One Thing, I will have done enough. Jesus promised me that if I seek His Kingdom, His Reality, His Righteousness, then all these things would be added to me. But once I find Him, I will have found everything I'll ever need.
I say "was" because it's literally 24 minutes before midnight and I waited to start typing this post until the very last possible minute... I'll have to post it the second I'm done to make sure it's posted in time, so bare with me if there's some grammatical errors... This one is just going to be a stream of consciousness I feel like...
Today started out feeling "off". Not like in a really bad way but you know that feeling like your whole world is tilted just a degree or two to one side and you can't quite wrap your finger around it (that phrase right there basically says it all)? That's how this day felt throughout most of it to be honest. I had a lot of people call and text and message and post about my birthday and it was so so sweet to have all that love flowing my way. So it wasn't that I didn't get a lot of love and gifts and kindness for my birthday... It just didn't feel like a birthday for some reason.
I was walking with Peyton to the library downtown which is a good 25-30 minute walk from our house and I was just trying to figure out what the matter was and why I just felt so "meh" on my special day - the day that signals the beginning of the new season God is uncovering in this new year of my life.
And the conclusion I came to in that moment was that I think I felt like 24 just sounded a little old to me (sorry to all my friends older than 24... just trying to be real here). And I was thinking about how age is such a big deal in our lives... We celebrate kids growing up a year and as a young child there is such hope and excitement surrounding that event. But as we get older, the celebration starts to fade into a realization that each new birthday celebration is really becoming more of a marker for how close we are to the end of our story here on earth rather than a connection to our beginning...
And I think the reason birthdays start to have this growing ache inside them as we get older is because we are eternal beings living inside temporal shells right now and the very reality that we are growing older and nearing death is completely paradoxical to our original design that we almost don't know how to face it cognitively.
We were never meant to grow old and die. We were made to live forever and the truth is that we will live forever... The Fall just broke our physical world so badly that God allowed us a way to exit this temporal reality into a realm of existence so glorious we cannot comprehend it. It's only by His Grace that we didn't eat from the Tree of Life after we'd eaten from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil... If we'd been given the chance, we would have lived on this broken earth for all eternity - living in a world that continues to decay until the point of living in an eternal hell on earth...
But, since Adam and Eve chose the serpent's reality over our Father's, death has become a gracious doorway for us to leave this fallen place and enter into our true eternities that will never grow dim or fade...
I know that's all really really deep for a birthday post but, hey... why not right?
All I know is that I feel it... I feel the weight of time's sands passing like a torrent through my finger tips. I feel the reality setting in that time is short and what I choose today will echo forever into the realms of eternity.
And I truly think that the greatest gift I was given today was probably the realization, once again, that I don't have any time to spare on trivial things. There is only time for Just One Thing and if I do that One Thing, I will have done enough. Jesus promised me that if I seek His Kingdom, His Reality, His Righteousness, then all these things would be added to me. But once I find Him, I will have found everything I'll ever need.
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