Okay, here I sit at nearly one a.m. on September 27th, 2009....my (gulp) fortieth birthday.
Just TYPING that word nearly made me cry!
FORTY years? You have to be kidding me. HOW can I be forty years old? I feel like I am just a kid. I don't feel like I know anything! Surely my whole life is still ahead of me, an unwritten page....
Wow. I am moving into middle age. I just can't believe it!
I have never been one to balk at birthdays. Never! In fact, the whole family jokes about how I have always done the countdown until "my" date arrives on the calendar...you know the type---when the clock on the microwave reads 9:27, I announce to everyone that my birthdate is on the clock. I then conveniently add "Let me take this opportunity to remind you that you have only 55 shopping days remaining until my next birthday!"
NOT this year. For some reason, I have faced this dawning of my new decade with a feeling of ambivalence, sometimes disbelief, and at times even panic! Seriously.
I feel I have finally pinpointed a bit of the reason for my dread of this new age I am forced to become: I don't feel like I have done or become all that I should have by the age of forty! I feel like I have dropped the ball somewhere, or I haven't finished my assignment on time...something!
I am realizing, through this mild "mid-life crisis" of sorts, that it doesn't matter. Who I am today, and what I have become, and what is left undone is NO surprise to Him who made me and guarded over my birth, forty years ago today (which was a miracle in itself in 1969, at 3 months premature---but that's another post!). He sees my heart, He wrote my days before I breathed my first breath, He sees the end from the beginning.....He knows me. HE knows ME! He KNOWS me.
For that, I am thankful. For everything I am not yet, HE IS. His Grace is more than enough to take me there.
I think I will sit my forty-year-old bones down and REST in that a spell! ;)
(Thanks, too, to my many dear friends for all the birthday wishes!! I am so grateful that I have met each of you on my journey!).
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4 comments:
Happy birthday, dear friend! Welcome to the 40's club. It's not so bad.
Hope you are truly doing well. :)
Speaking as someone who has been in this 40 club for 2 years...it's not so bad! Oh, and did you forget your kids? HOw is that not being and doing what God wants you to be and do! THere is no better "doing" than them!
Happy Birthday. Now I have lots to think about in my last year of my thirties. :)
hey, that's me :) - in a couple of years :) - i'll be 37 this year and feeling kind of the same. I read Teri Hatcher's Burnt Toast book and i could relate to some of it - despite our very different lifestyles :) - i'm thinking maybe it's part of getting to 40... and looking back a little...
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