Because You Are My Best Birthday Gift

by | Jun 22, 2013 | children, God's Love, grief, healing, motherhood, One Word, Pregnancy, river, Stories, Uncategorized

When I turned 29, I ate coconut cupcakes.

They were baked by my mother, in my kitchen, with my daughter. They were brought to my maternity ward hospital room by my pastor and his wife. That day I ate coconut cupcakes and introduced you to my dearest friends.

birthday cupcakes

Tomorrow, June 23, you and I will celebrate.

I made those same coconut cupcakes this week. I shared them with neighbors and sneaked more than a few myself after your bedtime, but, tomorrow, we won’t eat coconut cupcakes. We will share a dairy-free, wheat-free, nut-free birthday cake with Lego-shaped candles.

In the hospital, the day you were born, the nurse looked at the date on my admission bracelet and said, “Here is a son who will never forget his mother’s birthday.”

Tomorrow, I will probably remind you two or three times that it is also my birthday. But you are seven, and I do not mind all that much. Because you are the best birthday gift I have ever been given.

There is a story behind those words. A story to which I return every year on this day.

It is a story first of all about longing. I wanted a baby. I wanted a sibling for our daughter, but my body refused to cooperate. I had thought after our first experience, after the diagnosis and the referral to a good specialist, that the second time would be easy. We understood the problem, we would not wait to pursue the solution.

It was not easy.

It was so much harder. Because the drugs in which I had placed my faith did not work, it was also more hopeless.

Today, I am grateful for every month (months turning over into years) that I waited for you. Because of those months, the words of Job became my own: “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.” Now when I imagine, like all the parents in this world, every horrible thing that might happen, I am not afraid. I know that God can meet us in the pain and there is nothing else like that encounter.

But our hearts are not so easily untangled from fear. After the miracle of your conception, fears I didn’t even know I had twisted my thoughts. I felt as if I owed so much to God, and I became convinced there would be some price to pay. I became convinced there was something wrong with you.

Until that day. That day, six months along, when a stranger placed her hand on my shoulder and prayed for me. That day a river was unleashed and when I came up for air the fear was gone. I heard God’s own voice whisper: “This boy is a gift. A good and perfect gift. There is no price to pay.”

You’d think I would have known. Your due date was close enough to my own birthday. Why didn’t I guess?

Somehow, I never dreamed I would meet you for the first time on my birthday. God’s stories are so much better than the ones we imagine for ourselves.

Yes, you were born on my birthday. You were a good and perfect gift, given the day I turned 29.

Since that day, I have had reason to be afraid. So have you. I have given you food with my own hand and seen the fear in your eyes as your throat begins to swell. I have called 911 on your behalf too many times to count. I have seen how tiny you seem lying there on an emergency-room bed.

And yet I have never questioned those whispered words.

There is nothing wrong with you. Not really. You are, indeed, perfectly made. The worst thing can happen, but the Love who made you will take care of you. I pray always that you will be healed, but I know my prayers have been answered before I ever prayed them.

We have journeyed from coconut cupcakes to blue marshmallow cakes to gluten-free bakery cakes with Lego-shaped candles, and now I know these three things:

God is good.

There is no need to be afraid.

And this: our lives are stories, and these stories are written by Love.

happy birthday

Because the Ordinary is a Gift

by | Jan 7, 2013 | Religion, Seasons, Stories, Uncategorized

four and dad

 

I began to love stories when I was tiny (my father told a serial tale about a little girl and her many exotic pets). That love has only grown.  It makes perfect sense to me that I would want to measure my days with the Story.  Walking through a year with the liturgical calendar is, essentially, living the story of my faith from its beginning to its triumphant end.

Epiphany has past, and we are headed into the season of Ordinary Time.  As has happened to me before (and likely always will, for this seems to me the point of living the story), my own spiritual life is mirroring the spiritual life of the larger church, at least as it is expressed in the calendar.

To put it plainly: my days are ordinary.

Ordinary Time seems somehow outside of story.  There is no drama, no central narrative.  It isn’t Advent, Lent, or Easter.  The meaningful intensity of those periods is lacking.  Though time passes, it doesn’t feel as if we are on any kind of journey.  The days simply are.

I find it easy to wish these days away.  I like the excitement of storytelling.  I like to know that I am quickly moving from point A to point B, from introduction to conclusion.  I like that in books, I like that in church.  I like that in life.

I suppose I could make an argument that we are never, truly, outside of the story.  We never actually pause in our journeys, as humans, as communities.  However, it doesn’t feel right to me to push these days into the narrative mold.  It’s dishonest, I think, to dress these days up as more meaningful and significant than they are.

Perhaps they aren’t significant in terms of the story.  But could it be this lack of significance that makes them so amazing?

They are gloriously excessive.  They are like the galaxies, the uncounted stars and planets that have been created yet remain unseen by our eyes.  What are they for?  Why did God make them, anyway?  For the joy of it?

These ordinary days don’t matter all that much, but they’ve been given to us.  God gives the extraordinary – the birthdays, the graduation days, the holidays, the days spent on the mountaintop, and the days endured deep in a valley.  As if these weren’t enough, God gives us more.  He gives us the ordinary.

The blue-sky day in a month of blue skies.  The hand-holding day in a decade of holding that child’s hand.  The sunrise and the sunset, always and again.  My husband in the kitchen making breakfast for all of us, not because it’s Mother’s Day, but because it’s morning.

 

revised and reposted from the archives

 

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