October is for Birthdays

It’s going to be 80 degrees today, apparently. We are still sleeping with the window wide open and the fan blowing the tepid, dank air everywhere. The leaves outside my window are struggling, which is the Christian word for failure, to change from green to any other color. Lots of them have given up and gone brown. It feels a little bit like that Terry Pratchett novel where Death decides to take a holiday and no one can die for some embarrassing amount of time. The leaves were meant to let go and sail off, fluttering away into the windy sky, falling to earth to be buried, or raked up, or anything. But they cling on, confused, tired, disappointed.

Or maybe I’m reading too much into their thoughts and feelings. Perhaps it’s me I’m talking about.

It’s certainly not the two little girls who have October birthdays. They don’t care at all what the leaves are doing. And Death is certainly far away, pointing his bony, cheerful finger at Other People. As long as there is paper enough to keep revising and correcting the substantial birthday list, there is no cause for sadness whatsoever.

But they both have to climb over Matt’s birthday, which is today, to be able to get to their own. In this way his is a day of true celebration because it opens wide the gates of their own greedy self consideration. They have to make him a card or something, and wish him a happy birthday, and then they can get on with the weightier matters of their own rejoicing.

But it is Matt’s Birthday, this very day, and it is a good moment for them all to pause and reflect on their extraordinary good fortune at getting to have such a father.

I mean, it’s hard, I’m gathering, to find a good man out there. The proverb writer asks, sardonically, if anyone can find a good woman, a wife who won’t nag and irritate, who won’t be like rain falling on a tin roof. He then chuckles and moves on, amused by his own humor, to describe the kind of women he wishes would be available for marriage. But where is the description of what a woman might look for in a man?

Someone, I think, who wakes up before the dawn. Who frets over the bills and bank account, reworking the figures to accommodate the child standing around on one leg explaining how the new headphones are already broken and useless, and how the computer cord has been dipped into a cup of coffee and doesn’t really work any more, and can I please upgrade my Minecraft for the more expensive version. Who can be found in the kitchen, frying up stacks of waffles, or chopping piles of onions for a lunch, or soup kitchen supper that no one (me) wanted to face. Who locks himself in his room to study and struggle to rightly interpret the scriptural text, veering steadfastly away from inserting himself into his own hermeneutic, from flinching in the face of hard and unpalatable truth. He goes on week after week, day after day, listening, reading, writing, listening again.

The proof of his unselfish labors are in the pudding–a biblically literate healthy congregation that goes outside of the church doors to engage with a dying and decaying world, children who are growing up around him interested in the Bible, able to reason and think, to care for others, and a wife who doesn’t have to fret over the basic elements of work and home. It’s like I’m sitting around eating bonbons. That’s how good I have it.

The world likes a hero, a grand story of great deeds wrought in the eyes of the news conglomerate and social media. But what is really most valuable, I think, is the person who builds and plants in obscurity, who protects and plans so quietly and painstakingly that you don’t Need him to sweep in at the crisis, because there isn’t one constantly fomenting around the corner. Negligence, selfishness, thoughtlessness–these are the properties of so much of the wide world, of men and women who live with themselves at the center. It’s extraordinary to find their opposites–forethought, selflessness, honoring attention. The rippling effects of such character are ultimately felt far beyond the boundaries of his own house and family, his own congregation. They stretch and reach far into the future and beyond his walls. You might not notice him in the moment, because he’s working, he’s busy keeping his own house and family and church in order. But then, when you find your own world crumbling to bits, he’ll probably appear with his bible, prayer book, oil, to bring the word of Life, the unshakable love of Jesus into your darkest corner.

So, for him, I wish a really happy birthday. And also a pie.