I Am What Survives Me

​I turn 61 today.

I told a friend recently that "being in your 60s" sounds so much older than turning 60 🤣.

The truth is, though, I don't much fret about growing older these days. When I was born, the life expectancy for a white male was 67 years old. By so many measures I have already lived a life longer and more full of goodness than one deserves.

Don't get me wrong. It's not like I'm trying to write my obituary here. At least not one I want read this afternoon. But it is true that I no longer worry if this will indeed be the day of its reading.

Erik Erikson once said, "I am what survives me."

I think about that a lot these days. I used to think my life would be measured by what I achieved. The titles. The milestones. The things I could point to and say, “There, now you can see that I matter.”

But life has a way of reshaping what you measure. It teaches you that the things you can touch, the trophies you can display, the boxes you can check - they all eventually gather dust.

What doesn’t gather dust is love. What doesn’t fade is the kindness you offer when no one was looking. What doesn’t disappear is the courage you hand to someone else in the middle of their fear.

What survives us isn’t what we owned, but what we gave away.

I am indeed learning - I am what survives me.

I am the way my sons will remember how they were loved more for who they are than for anything they could accomplish.

I am the prayers whispered when no one knew I was struggling, but God heard them anyway.

I am the words I dared to write, even when I wasn’t sure anyone would understand them, or read them at all, simply because I wanted someone to know they aren't alone.

I am not the awards I won or the mistakes I made. I am the lessons I leave behind, the love that keeps moving forward, the small moments that become someone else’s strength long after I'm gone.

I think about my grandfathers - dead for many decades now - yet in me, they are living with hearts pounding out more love than ever. Their gentleness is in the hearts of my two sons who will only ever know the parts of those men that survived them.

I think about the books I read from authors long gone, the songs I sing, the games I play - all things that have survived a past to so beautifully shape my todays.

I think about that man on the cross, thousands of years ago, more alive in me today than he was ever alive when he was surviving his own humanity.

Thank you, Jesus.

Another birthday marks another year closer to the end of this life, but strangely, that no longer feels like loss.

It feels like planting. It feels like trusting the soil to do what it was always meant to do: carry life beyond the one who plants life.

I don’t know how many more birthdays I have ahead. But I know this:

I still have seeds to plant.

Still have stories to tell.

Still have people to love.

Because I am not just who I am while I’m here. I am what survives me.

I encourage you, as I begin this journey of "being in my 60s" - and as you continue your fight of being in your own survival - give heart and thought to what might survive you.

Give heart to all that you can still plant.

Oh how this world needs planters more than survivors right now.

Planters like you and me.