I’m about to cross over the line from thirty-eight to thirty-nine. I managed to go along thinking for a whole year that I was going to be turning thirty-eight, not that I was already there. It was a tragic moment to discover I’d practically lost a whole year, as it were. I mean, I did live through it, so not totally lost, but I lived through it without paying attention.
As anyone who has read any number of years of my blogging knows, I hate my birthday. Really, truly. It is a day of sorrow and mourning, a day of gnashing of the teeth and thinking about how much I hated boarding school. It is a day for considering and treasuring up the myriad disappointments, the wrongly held expectations, the many threaded tragedies of human existence. It is the day to look out at my own fingers and toes and be sad about the isolation of my mind and body, that I can only be myself, that I can never truly know and understand another person because of the limitations of my very soul. It is a day to look up at God and mutter, “for heaven’s sake, how long”.
And then, when the day is over, I return to my usual cheerful ways. Ask anyone, I am the very model of up beat, Pollyanna optimism. Sunday will find me with a smile behind the eyes and the snatches of a song on my lips, probably.
However, this year, as I look out over the ruins of western civilization, as I sit in shock over the narrowing callousness of popular opinion, as I observe the closing of civic discourse and the true rejection of Christianity, I think it might be appropriate to express, and even to try to feel, a fleeting moment of gratitude. Because, well, goodness, I am still alive. I made it out of the womb, no small feat in today’s world, and a fact for which I am eternally grateful to my mother. I lived a charmed and delightful traveling childhood. I received a top notch education. I was, and am daily, rescued from myself by the mighty, merciful saving hand of Jesus. I was allowed to get married, to a nice person, who isn’t weird. I have been delivered of six whole live babies who are growing up and turning out to be basically interesting. I mean, I even have a dog. There isn’t anything, in the whole realm of human desire, at least historically, that I have not been given. All this has been taken for granted, I think, both by me on the average day, but also by the ordinary westerner almost every day. Sure, I am alive, and my life matters. Does it matter if anyone else gets to have their life? The answer is increasingly no. I’m not saying no, but I hear no being lived out on every side.
Can gratitude, along with the constant confession of sin and the humility of a broken spirit, make any ripple against the countervailing cultural darkness? Can waking up and just being thankful for the number of people who are alive, for their gifts and interests, blow away some of the ugliness? Can measuring out the goodness of God, day by day, chip down any of the wall of unconcern? Being the true pessimist that I am I can’t imagine that it will, but I don’t have any other ideas. So, as a gift to the entire world, on my birthday, here’s me being thankful.
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