Happy Birthday To Me- Sixty Trips Around the Sun

On the occasion of my fortieth birthday I wrote- “Wisdom means in part, recognizing the blessing of growing older.” Ten years later I opined about this nugget, “Easier said than done.” Ten years later still and I’m learning that each year makes it easier.

I’ve reached that age where birthday decorations come in black. I’m on the down side of the hill. And I’m picking up speed. Each year spins by faster than the last, and the Grim Reaper is gaining ground. Which, ironically, is why getting older actually gets easier. Age teaches that for every earthly blessing that lies behind there’s a far greater blessing that lies before you.

As we age the veil between heaven and earth grows more thin. The “bad” news is that it becomes all the easier to break right through. The good news is that it not only becomes all the easier to break right through, but all the easier to see right through. Aging is that process by which we move from believing this world is the real world and the other ephemeral and distant to believing we are now in the shadowlands, and headed to a reality more real than what we have known.

I don’t know what my Lord has in store for me in the coming decades. He has cared for me in the six decades He walked with me. He has promised me blessings for eternity. Every gift I cherish on this earth- my wife, our children, cake and ice cream, a story well told, a log fire on a snowy evening, will in one form or another make it into the new heavens and new earth. Death is not trading this blessing for a better blessing. It is adding greater blessings to blessings that continue.

As my precious wife is prone to remind me, wisdom of God’s gold that drops from her lips, “in Your book they all were written, The days fashioned for me, When as yet there were none of them” (Psalm 139:16). How many pages are left? Only the author knows. But when those pages close, they close with words not far from these from the pen of CS Lewis in The Last Battle:

“’The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.’
And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

Happy birthday indeed.