Another day, another year

I was eight in the pictures, I believe, when we had the great birthday party in West Virginia. I was, uh, hesitant to eat things I wasn't sure I liked, and my mother was quite the one to allow me my strangeness so the photo shows a cake half covered in icing and half plain. I didn't, you see, like icing for some very weird reason that I've clearly overcome.

I was 14, I believe, when we had the great birthday party at our home in Lizelia, Miss. I don't remember cake, though we might have had it. I remember baseball with my friends all afternoon in the front yard with a makeshift wall (barbed-wire fence) that was too short to have troubled us but did.

I remember when we had the great 30th birthday party in Reno, Nev. We worked then adjourned to a hotel room I had won in a business card lottery and we had cake. I definitely remember cake. Lots of cake.

That's it. Those are my memories of birthdays. I'm sure there must have been a party or two more, but I have no memory of them. It could just be that I've never been, as some are, that happy about being one year older. Don't know why particularly, but it's true. It's like that old song about being "another day older and deeper and debt."

There simply has to be more.

I've lived what would have been an insufferably long time in earlier centuries. I rise and check calendars for which doctor I will see today, which body part will hurt most today, and I wonder how long these hurts will go on.

But like scriptures tell me, it is about growing old, not getting old, about becoming not about having become.

First Peter says, "So don't lose a minute in building on what you've been given, complementing your basic faith with good character, spiritual understanding, alert discipline, passionate patience, reverent wonder, warm friendliness, and generous love, each dimension fitting into and developing the others. With these qualities active and growing in your lives, no grass will grow under your feet, no day will pass without its reward as you mature in your experience of our Master Jesus. Without these qualities you can't see what's right before you, oblivious that your old sinful life has been wiped off the books."

Birthdays, it seems, should be about one more notice in the belt of spiritual growth, not about growing older. Getting better should be the goal, not cake.

Although icing would appeal.