Birthday Cake and Humble Pie

I journaled a few weeks ago in my post, Segues, Seeds, and Seasons, that new beginnings are rarely wrapped up with a bow on top, but rather tend to come in very messy packages indeed, such as "civil wars, screaming babies, and shattered seeds..."...Little did I know how prophetic those casually written words would prove to be...

My birthday was on October 13th, and, I guess there's that five year old in me that still looks forward to birthdays as much as ever and perhaps builds the day up in my mind a bit more than it ought to be built up, demanding it carry much more weight than my thirty seven years have warranted.

The day, or rather, the eve of the day, yes, "Birthday Eve" I suppose we'll call it, began with a crushing disappointment, which I think on a Tuesday in the middle of July would have been merely noted as a minor setback, however, this being "Birthday Eve", it was heralded in with hyperbole, and therefore, yes, it was crushing.

This epic event began a cold war in my house which lasted almost a week, unprecedented division, icy intervals, and embarrasingly unbirthday like behaviour from yours truly...

Had I really made myself and the celebration of myself so important that I had displaced the larger lessons of love and grace, kindness and humility?   Was I so determined that everything should be perfect to the point of making my dearest loved one feel like a pariah when the envisioned utopia did not materialize? 

There was an Infant King long ago who arranged His first birthday in a barn, Whose birthday guests were barnyard animals and Whose seat of honor was a stable, Whose confetti was cow food, straw and hay, Whose special day was heralded by one tiny candle of a star, and it wasn't even attached to a cake.  This is how He chose to enter the world, to celebrate His life and His life to come, in abject anonymity, in hiddeness and humility, without pomp or pretense, His first birthday came and went.

I learned a hard lesson this week, I saw a part of myself I didn't like very much at all, one which I would've loved to wrap up pretty with a bow on top, decorated in excuses and justifications, rationalizations and reason...But, as Hannah Hurnard wrote long ago, "He loves me far too well to leave me in my self-made hell, a Saviour is my Lord"...

He had a different birthday gift altogether in mind for me, a new beginning not wrapped in frilly superfluity, embellished with my shallow expectations, but in stark humility, in terse truth, a gift that would serve me well for a lifetime, instead of merely mesmerizing for a moment...

C.S. Lewis once wrote, "I do not believe that God primarily wants us to be happy; I think what He wants is for us to learn to love and to learn to be loved; I think He wants us to Grow Up."

That's what a birthday is all about afterall, getting older, growing up, a measure of maturity, and to perhaps begin to bear more of a resemblance to the one we were born to...or born again to...

Embracing Lewis' philosophy, it seems happiness - and happy birthdays - will surely follow...

"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning." - James 1:17