birthday

It is my younger sister's 17th birthday today. (Well, probably yesterday by the time I actually post this.) I was going to try to get her out of school for lunch today, but I was denied by the secretary at the school, and although I could have pretty easily persuaded her to let me do, I decided not to press the issue.

Birthdays (and holidays in general) have always been scattered and haphazard at my house. Today, for instance, there was really no formal celebration. We will be having lasagna together on Sunday but there isn't any formal celebration. Sometimes we try...and it usually is pretty uneventful.

I've found that I like this way of celebrating these things. I don't like lots of extravagance for a day out of the year when someone was born or something great happened. I don't mind acknowledging the fact and praying a special blessing on them...but the idea of celebration of birth has always been a little weird to me.

Call me crazy, but I kind of enjoyed it when I missed a couple of my own birthdays in college.

I wonder if anyone back in the day (meaning Jesus and earlier) celebrated birthdays...what about those who lived to be 900? Do you think they had some weird thing equivalent to us putting candles on a cake? Somehow, I doubt it.

May our lives be continually bent on this then: magnifying the grace of Christ displayed on the cross in all things. And instead of asking the questions "what's wrong with celebrating a birthday?" instead we should ask "how does this celebration magnify the one who redeemed me?"

(For the record, I'm not going Jehovah Witness and rejecting holidays.)

-joe