Today, I celebrate my 42nd birthday!
Okay, so, I'll try and offer up a brief note of wisdom that I hope is a decent reflection of 42 years of living - good living!
My only regret is that I've probably spent far too much of these 42 years trying to live up to other people's expectations, standards, and rules. I've lived too much of my years fretting over others' opinions of me - hoping they like me, accept me, really love me.
In this sense, I'm really no different from anyone else. We all want to be loved and accepted. On the flip side, rejection and disappointment may be our biggest handicappers in life, and nothing creates space in our lives for rebellion and negative behavior like these twin adversities.
Something has happened for me over the past 5 years. Somehow, the "light" of God's Love was finally able to burn through the fog of people's opinions and peers' expectations. Had I come to a sense of this overwhelming love earlier in life, I would have avoided a lot of self-destructive behavior. I would have spent more of my faith-walk enjoying God's love rather than trying to earn people's love. I would have, therefore, avoided a lot of self-destructive behavior, the kind that grows out of the resentment and anger that develops in a person's heart when your best is never quite good enough.
So, on my birthday, my prayer for you is that you will come to know the length, height, and depth of God's immeasurable love for you, and that God's love will chase away all of your demons of fear, rejection, disappointment, resentment, and anger.
In one of my favorite recent movies, "Ratatouille", there is a scene in the movie when Remy, a rat, gets separated from his family and lost in a sewage. After days of swimming, fighting through dung and waster water, he finally decides go "go for it" and climb out of the sewer. When he does, he pushes open a sewer-drain cover, looks around, and says, "You mean, all of this time I've been living in Paris?!"
Climb out of your sewers, your waste-places, your places of rejection and shame, and look around! All of your life, you've been living in the love of God!
Happy May 1st!
