How I Spent My 50th Birthday

Man, I always love Facebook on my birthday. So far today, a ridiculous 400* posts on my page, not counting the private messages and comments. It's so awesome to just allow that to wash over me. Thank you, everyone.

Personal friends from all along the road...
The good and wonderful folks at Northaven...
Minister friends...
Musicians friends...
Justice-seekers...
Political friends...

And all those wonderful folks I've met  just from writing this blog and being on Facebook.

You need to know just how much I know that I a blessed, blessed guy. Way beyond anything I could deserve.

So, as I've made clear both here and on Facebook, I am allowing the calendar to have its way with me. In this season of life, staring fifty in the face, I'm refusing to look away. Not gonna blink.

And, again, not because I am a glutton for punishment. But more because it's just here. It just is. It's this big marker, this big moment, and it seems to me we (I) humans hurry through way too many big moments.

I still agree with what I said here. "Fifty sucks."

But, look, I can also be realistic. If it's inevitable, then why not listen to what it's telling me, right?
So, that's what I'm trying to do.

The first step? Looking back.

Today, I pulled a large, heavy old trunk out of the garage, picked the lock, and found my journals. The really old ones. The newer years were here in the house, packed in the drawers of my writing desk. But I went waaay back, to the first time I apparently ever journalled.

Then, I placed all the books in order by year on the floor, just to see what the years looked like.
Here they are...

 

That red book near the front is 1982. There's one book for 1983-84. Then, you start to see multiple books, starting in 1986. Clearly, in 1988, things kick into high gear. Sometimes six or seven books in a year for about the next decade.

Then, back on the next-to-back row, you'll see a purple book. That's 1997. The year Maria was born. You can see how it dramatically slacks off after that. Visually, it's obvious that I'm lucky to get through one book a year, for the past fifteen.

It's an interesting visual picture, which I'd never put together before today. I'd always assumed that "getting busy in ministry" had caused my journaling to slack off. I probably also blamed marriage too. I think I also assumed it slacked off when I became a senior pastor. (And, there is some truth to that...)

But, it's pretty clear that the biggest shift (downward) in journaling, happens in 1997. The most obvious culprit: Parenthood.

My guess is, when I read back through, I will find a young and giddy Dad who just didn't have the time.

So, a part of moving through this season-of-being-fifty (note how that's not a "day") is going to be reading back through these books. I've plowed through the first two today, which gets me through undergraduate school and to the end of my first semester at Perkins.

I don't plan to spill too much of the personal junk out here. But, I will say one pretty clear learning from today: that those first books detail the beginning of a journey of self-discovery.

Some entries from these first books sound like a love-sick school boy (which I was...). But by the end, I'm a young man on a personal journey, who probably has no clue just how life-long the journey will be.

It's kinda cool to read it on the page.

So, no additional scoop here. Hey, I agree with the old journalling prayer:

"Now I lay me down to sleep,

 I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake,

Throw my journal in the lake."

All I'll say is that over the next few weeks, I look forward to getting reacquainted with me.

And, as for turning fifty? I found some nice quotes about it, and posted them here.

Some of them, you will find, express polar opposite sentiment. That's on purpose. Because I intend to be open to it all. 

In one place, you see Norah Ephron saying:

"Every so often I read a book about age, and whoever's writing it says it's great to be old. It's great to be wise and sage and mellow: it's great to be at the point where you understand just what matters in life. I can't stand people who say things like this."

And I love that. But, then I follow it with the anonymous:
"Do not regret growing older. It is a privilege denied to many." 

Given Norah Ephron's death this year, it does make you pause.And make you grateful.

I think my favorite two quotes basically say the same things, but from differing spiritual perspectives. I closed with them on purpose, and I repost them there:

"Except ye become as little children, except you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, "ye cannot enter the kingdom of God." One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again."
-- Dorothy L. Sayers

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” 
--Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

Yep. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Here's to being born again, again.

* As of the end of the day, it was right around five hundred. Which I tell you not to brag, but because it amazes me every year....wow....

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Thoughts on Fifty

“50 years: here’s a time when you have to separate yourself from what other people expect of you, and do what you love. Because if you find yourself 50 years old and you aren’t doing what you love, then what’s the point?”
-- Jim Carrey

"Every so often I read a book about age, and whoever's writing it says it's great to be old. It's great to be wise and sage and mellow: it's great to be at the point where you understand just what matters in life. I can't stand people who say things like this."
–- Nora Ephron

"Do not regret growing older. It is a privilege denied to many."
-- Unknown

“If somebody a while back had offered me a thousand more years, I would have leapt at it, but at this point I would be inclined to beg off... The eventual end to life seems preferable to the idea of an endless and endlessly redundant extension of it. I wish such faith as I have had been brighter and gladder. I wish I had done more with it. I wish I had been braver and bolder. I wish I had been a saint.”
-- Frederick Buechner

“Some people are old at 18 and some are young at 90. Time is a concept that humans created."
-- Yoko Ono

"Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age."
-- Victor Hugo

"The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down."
-- TS Elliot

"Gray hair is God's graffiti."
-- Bill Cosby

"Except ye become as little children, except you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, "ye cannot enter the kingdom of God." One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again."
-- Dorothy L. Sayers

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
―- Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez


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Slipping Through My Fists

In just a few days, I'll turn fifty.

I could pretend to tell you all sorts of things about it, but frankly all I can say is that so far it sucks.

I'm not handling "fifty" well. (btw, my Mom says she and Dad aren't either...)

I know, I know. It's definitely "better than the alternative." But, I can't shake the reality that's also a marker in time. One I'm being compelled to pay attention to. One I can't avoid. I'm not overly brooding...it's just "there."

I've always been attracted to this David Wilcox song, about a man who finds himself in middle age, back in the town where he grew up.
So, today, I recorded a quick version during the break of a retreat I'm on...




Many thanks to David Wilcox for writing this. Here's a link to the lyrics on his page, and from there a link where you can buy his version.

I've always loved this melancholy song from afar. And now, it seems, I'm at that place, and I suppose I understand a bit more about it.

Yes, it's better than that alternative. But it's also a marker in time.

Most of my reflection about turning fifty --the important part-- will be inward. It won't have anything to do with what I post here. I just wanted to take the time to note the feelings of this week.

Thus far, fifty sucks.

The good news is that life, and God, often prove me wrong.

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