My Favourite Birthday Card
A month or so ago, I turned the grand old age of sixty. A few weeks earlier, I asked my wife if she would help me turn off my age data on Facebook - a platform I do not use all that much anyway - so that my birthday could pass by unnoticed.
This was
not because I wanted to avoid the facts of the case, it was because I notice in the Scriptures that Birthdays
don't get a good rap mainly because they are opportunities for excess - Pharoah and Herod both chop off heads on their birthdays. Job's children, he fears, will have sinned through excess on their birthdays. We never find the apostles taking a day off because it's their birthday. Birthdays are non-entities in New Testament Christianity.
Following this global and universal trend of excess, we must confess that we make far too much of a fuss over birthdays. I doubt if anyone thought of birthdays in the persecuted yet beautiful Underground Church of former communist USSR. Our zeal for birthday celebrations is a direct consequence of living in an age of ease: we simply have too much time and too much money on our hands.
(Notwithstanding, I appreciated every token of kindess shown to me on my sixtieth!)
A Pslamic Approach
The first thing I notice about the passing of the years comes from Psalm 90, the reflections of Moses in the late winter of his life.
Moses is sober about the turn of the seasons. He starts with the eternity of God, to set our few three score and ten years in context. "From everlasting to everlasting you are God."
He ponders the utter sovereignity of the Lord over life and death. "You sweep men away in the sleep of death."
He reflects the sinfulness of our present lives and the consequent discipline of the Lord, "all our days pass away under your wrath."
He remembers that he has no home in this world, for the Lord has been his "dwelling place throughout all the generations."
And he utters the note of passionate longing that marks every Spirit-born saint, "Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love."
I make three short observations on my sixtieth year...
Contrast
The first is how little I have accomplished for the Kingdom of God in my life thus far. I do not say that to attract symapthy. I was brought up in a missionary home, by parents who were sold out for Jesus in a way I have never witnessed anywhere in anyone. And I know that their zeal and accomplishments and sacrifices for the sake of the Gospel far outstrip mine.
Without models around us, we tend to think we're doing OK. But having lived with humble godly sold-out parents, I know that I have done little by contrast.
Thanksgiving
I am profoundly thankful to the Lord for his amazing mercy to me over these six decades. He has showered gifts on me that I do not deserve. He has given me a lovely godly wife who is both my best friend and my kindest critic.
The Lord has given me four wonderful sons. I often marvel how well they have turned out considering their dad! I thank the Lord for the precious gift of children.
The Lord has granted me wonderful health. People have said to me "I can't believe you are sixty years old!" If that is true, I put it down to the grace of God. Perhaps I have inherited good genes. Perhaps the example of my dad who walked every where every day has inspired my daily walking habits. Perhaps the copied custom of my parents to fast regularly has helped my body to repair itself. I don't know, but all is of grace, not me.
The Lord has given me the opportunity to serve his people - a high calling which I so enjoy, though it is often exhausting. I am particularly thankful for the loving and supportive church it has been my privilege to serve for the last 14 years, and especially the godly leaders who have been by my side through calm as well as storm.
So I look back with deep and profound thankfulness.
Hope
But finally, since I am trying to be brief, I look forward with hope. My father, in whose long shadows I often find myself, began his greatest ministry at the age of 60, retiring at the age of 84 (much as Moses began his at 80, retiring at 120). So if the Lord provides health and strength, I sincerely hope I can serve the Lord and be of some use in his kingdom in the summer and autumn of my life.
Perhaps at the age of "18" I can use my "42" years of experience to bless other!
Nothing terrifies me more than the secular idea of retirement - the idea of living a new lazy selfish life, simply playing golf or visiting the grandchildren or wasting both time and money on travel. That would be utter purgatory to me!
My greatest hope is to go home. This world is emphatically not my home. To be honest I often feel a stranger in the west, for I was born and shaped by a poor missionary life in Pakistan.
Many missionary kids (MKs) refer to themselves as "third culture" kids. Not at home where they were born on the missionfield, not at home back in the west, straddling two cultures, happy in neither, a kind of third culture nomad.
Well, I'm a fourth culture kid, for nowhere here is my home. And the older I get the more I long to depart and be with Christ which is better by far.
But the Lord may have work for me to do here. And I have children who still need me (they never really 'leave home!') and a wife I dearly love and want to grow old with. So we mustn't be selfish about leaving, must we?
In the 60s, on the shores of the Aabian Sea each summer, the Summers' Family would spend ten days or so in a clapped out wooden beach hut. There in the cool of the evening shadows, we sang what I have always felt is the true song of my heart:
This world is not my home, I'm just a passing through
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue;
The angels beckon me from heaven's open door,
And I can't feel at home in this world anymore.
If heaven's not my home, then Lord what will I do?
The angels beckon me from heaven's open door,
And I can't feel at home in this world anymore.
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