Ours is not a never ending story

​Birthdays always seem to come to me with great reflection. As I get older, that intensifies.

The thing is, with each birthday, and another reminder I'm closer to death, it's not MY death I find myself reflecting on. What I find myself reflecting on is the potential death of the things I've not left the world that I know the world is supposed to have.

Donald Miller says, "If our stories went on forever, no action would be important because everything could wait till tomorrow. It's the sense of pending death that encourages us to get busy living."

I reflected on an image yesterday. It was my funeral. All of you lovely people who sent happy birthday wishes - you were there. It was quite the party 😊🍨.

But I didn't show up (which meant more ice cream for you all). I was attending the funeral of all the things I'd intended to contribute to the world but never got around to contributing. Because all of our unfinished business is forever unfinished the day we die.

It is forever a dream. A slowly fading wish.

As I was looking over all of those wishes and dreams, I realized they'd all been victimized by me. While I was spending a life too often villainizing a world I thought had mistreated me, or on another day hiding from that world - wholly willing to be its victim - when in reality those wishes and dreams were the only true victims.

I told someone yesterday that this latest birthday might have been my hardest one to get to. But I did get to it.

And the truth is, I hope getting to the next one is even harder. Because living - living IS actually hard. Living in the world and contributing something that doesn't die an unfinished death when you die - that's much harder than attacking the world or hiding from it.

Birthdays tell the story of our age. They are a counting tool. But the stories that matter - at least to me - are the stories that remain when the counting is over.

The stories that we wrote into the world when we weren't hiding from it or blaming it.

That was my wish. No, that was my commitment - as I blew out the candle in my ice cream last night.

No more hiding.

No more blaming.

Just writing.