Dear Mid-Life 40 something Birthday person (mainly me) but a few others including Wanda, Sumitra, Ann, Elizabeth, and others,

Happy Birthday! When you blow out your candles ponder over these things and whatever else your heart tells you to focus on. 

40-something. You’re about half way through life, old BraveHeart. Half way.

So let’s live backwards from your 90th birthday cake. We should always Live backward from the end goal. Look at who’s in the room singing off tune on your 90th birthday — and who are you making room for right now?

I want to be the weathered woman of 9 decades, still excited about life and God and grace, hunched over her cake, looking around a room of babies slung on hips and grinning teenagers and the gathering of the generations. I hope they sing old hymns and new style praise songs. I want to sing Amazing Grace to this group and recite Psalm 23 by heart and count our blessings together and eat cake.

I envision a rising of accents and the richness of skin colours and a poverty of spirit that knows the luckiness of Jesus-grace, and I hear the raucous of a room of the gloriously rowdy and live your life backwards from that last birthday cake. (Ann Voskamp)


What are my priorities that will be celebrated at this 90th birthday party? These are the things I’m focusing on now. My principles for this 90 year life.

1. Keep young people around. Especially the little people. They see things you are bound to miss without them.  Thank you Jordan for focusing on love, hugs, kisses, fun and sweetness.  Making a small person one of your greatest priorities makes your life great.

2. Read! Read the Bible. Reread books that touched you when you were younger. Read things that show you how to be a more compassionate human being. Read up on a new interest area. Learn something new. 

3. Stay in love. I’m holding on to this with all my life. Stay in touch, stay in truth and grace, and stay in the Story and, above all else: stay in love. Life is too short to move on to anything else. And mid-life is flat-out begging you: Risk it all. Risk large, risk now, risk your heart, risk for what ultimately matters.

Go back to school. Go reconcile. Go make it right. Invest in a dream that terrifies you. Do the hard thing that terrifies you. Start a business, a class, a soup kitchen, a friendship, a dinner club, a memoir, a church, a marathon, a family. Just start. Start over.
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4. You life is art. Rake the risk and create! Risk is your friend who walks with you where you want to go. Risk is the friend who knows the way to where you want to go. Enjoy risk’s company.

5. Live into something bigger than you, that will require more than you, that will require faith and hope and miracles and God.Why waste your one life on any one’s small box?
Believe it:

6. Our God is a good God. Pray to Him. Make your life a prayer.Make your work your worship, make your days your doxology, make your life your liturgy, and make Christ your only King. Your work may burn up or cause you to burn out, but the prayers enfolded into the stacks of laundry, the stirred soup, the stairs swept — they will survive fire.

7. The cure to anxiety and an overwhelmed life begins with a daily overdose of Scripture. (Keep trying to memorize it)
Leave a Bible open to the Psalms by the sink, on the desk, at the table, eat His book every time you eat because the truth is: Stay in His Story to stay walking on waves.

What you focus on — is what you become like.
What you focus on — is what you become like.
Focus on good — and you’ll see more good everywhere to focus on.

8. Give more grace than advice.

9. You integrity is you only legacy. Hunger for integrity more than popularity, celebrity, or prosperity, — because your integrity is your only legacy.

10. Being broken is good. It keeps you soft and open and things can grow in soft and open spaces.

Let the rains come down into the soil of your heart, let whatever needs to rain simply come, and grow whatever He needs to grow, however He needs to grow it, because He reigns and knows what is best, and in our tender surrender, the glory of our God wins.

There may be another 40-something years left, there may only be another 16,425 days left.

And honestly? As many days, as moments, between here and 90, or as many remain?
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At this 90-something party, I want to eat the cake of amazing grace. Pay attention to God. Pay attention to my family. Worship God in all that I do.
Be grateful, live given, show grit. 

I am a part of that epic story just as you are a part of that epic story! Your life will be celebrated in glory because you were created and imagined by a loving, beautiful, glorious Savior who cares for you. (Psalm 139:23-24)

Have a piece of that amazing grace cake!

I remember discussing the Robert Frost poem “The Road Not Taken” in high school and wondering what was down the path that was not as worn down.  It reminds me of real life in trying to follow a path few have chosen and even fewer seem to understand.  Psalm 1 describes two paths.  It sets the stage for the rest of the Psalms, our ultimate prayer book and evidence of every emotion imaginable. It is interesting to note that it was likely written last. It is the finishing touch, defining the contents and fixing the atmosphere on which all of the Scripture is prayed and lived.

But first a story about the Scottish Pastor Alexander Whyte.  When he was addressing a group of theological students, he said, "Ah! I envy you young men with your ministry before you., and especially that you ahead a lifetime of explaining the Psalms to your people!" His delight and and satisfaction in providing a exposition on the Psalms began at the very outset.

"Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,                                                  nor stands in the way of sinners,           
not sits in the seats of scoffers. (verse 1)

Blessed.  It's a beautiful word that announces a sense of well-being, wholeness, happiness.

Jesus used this word eight times in the Sermon on the Mount.  He laid out eight ways to be blessed that the listeners hadn't thought of before.  Here is one of many instances that Christ captured the Psalms.

The psalmist says we are blessed when we do not walk in the counsel of the wicked. As we travel in faith, we are surrounded by others who counsel, advise, urge us in ways that guarantee our happiness. Their advice is supported with statistics and documents. Have you (and I) learned to not be impressed. We are learning to listen to a different drummer.

We are also blessed if we do not stand in the way of sinners. An easier way of understanding this is to not stand around or hangout with those who aren't going anywhere.  They are "in the way" but each one stands making small talk.  They have plans, dream up projects, are great conversationalists, but if we listen long enough, we realize it is mostly hot air.

We do not in the seat of scoffers either. A seat is a place to deliberate, to make judgments, to render decisions. Scoffers look down on others who have't the sense to take a position. They sit together with the know-it-alls. It's a place of cynicism, gossip, and superficial witticisms.  No judge sits over them and no counsel informs them.  They hold nothing in authority but their own so-called cleverness.  Spurgeon, the famous British preacher, called them the "Doctors of Damnation" (The Treasury of David).  

It's important to note that there are three rejected ways of living.  They descend from "walk", "stand" and finally "sit".  It can go from activity to passivity, from the dynamic to to sedentary, sluggish immobility, internal imprisonment. 

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The blessed way of life is then elaborated in two phrases:

But his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night. (verse 2)

We are brought into the world of the Word made flesh.  The world of revelation, the Scriptures, and Jesus.  It is not superstition or guesswork.  It's a world where there is a personal relationship between a God who is involved in our salvation.  Our salvation that is revealed in the Sinai Law of Moses, the preaching of the prophets and apostles, and the good news revealed in Jesus.

We take delight in this through meditation. This does not mean to just read it or just memorize it. Meditate gives the connotation that it is something monks and nuns do in their monasteries or what you might do in contemplating a beautiful sunset.  It's something you do when you are serious about God.

In the original language, the word meditate has to do with slow thinking or slow eating.  We are to literally or slowly chew or masticate or suck on a lollipop.

The best illustration I can think of is what a dog does with a bone. I am sure you have seen it. The dog takes the bone to a private place and goes to work.  He gnaws, turns it over, licks it. He is enjoying himself and is no hurry. Often for a few hours, the dog enjoys the bone, buries, it, and returns the next day to take it up again. An average bone can last about a week.

The dog meditated his bone. You and I are to meditate the revelation in Scripture and Jesus.

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The meditating person is

" ... like a tree
planted by streams of water,
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither,
In all that he does, he prospers." (verse 3)

Why is there a tree here? Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Jesus use the same image.  An example of robust, long life with strength and beauty.

"...planted by streams of water" is such a lovely detail. It is a planted tree, not something wild growing by chance.  These streams were Babylonians canals that were put into the desert to provide moisture and make agriculture possible in a land of dust of sand. 

The Hebrews were in Babylonian exile when this Psalm was written. They were the tree that had been the object of special care and cultivation, the knowledge and skill of the horticulturist God. Brains and purpose had brought to bear on this tree.

The planning and planting had been successful.  The tree bears fruit and is perpetually green. Creation and redemption are effective and not an illusion.

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"The wicked are not so
but are like chaff which the wind drives away.
Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgement,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous." (verses 4-5)

The chaff here is written to contrasted with the tree.  The wicked, the sinners, the scoffers have persisted in their lack of seriousness and have maintained their course on the road to nowhere.

Chaff is the closest description to nothing that was available. It has no weight, no meaning, no use. Without meaning and responsibility, the wicked have no existence to speak of at all.  It is the dried up husk of something that once bloomed, bore fruit, and brightened the landscape. The wicked are far from what they had been created to be. They are at the mercy of breezes and winds. No roots and no life. There is nothing to them, defined now only by what they are not.

The rather terrifying conclusion is that the life of the wicked/sinner/scoffer is the complete inability to be anything.

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"For the Lord knows the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish." (verse 6)

These last two lines show the end result of the two ways of life, the life of the tree and the life of the chaff.  The verb here knows is alive with gospel.  It's the same verb we see in Genesis 4:1 where Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived.

This verb is deeper than our modern day notion of dealing with information.  In the Christian sense, it is firsthand relationship, personal knowledge, historical, and existential. In Christ, God knows us, and then, because the initiative has been Spirit-given to us, we know God. It is personal and experienced.

None of us are finished with finding ourselves personally in Psalm 1 until we pay meditative attention to Christ's comprehensive definition of himself in his his last conversation with his disciples.  He says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6 KJV). 

Christ gives his life as an exposition, an incarnation, a presence of how this way works itself out in our lives. This psalm gets our feet wet on the way to Jesus, reading and meditating on the Scriptures in a companionship in which we acquire a feel for the Jesus way of blessing.

Amen for the way!

I am reading a biography of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged in 1945 for his role in the plot to kill Hitler.  I will feel very accomplished when I finish Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.

Suddenly the door opens and my 4 year old son, Jordan, bounces in. Seeing the book, he attempts to climb into my lap so I can read to him as well. I put down the biography, pick him up, and select Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You?, which is in the pile of books beside my chair along with Bonhoeffer’s Ethics and Half the Church by Carolyn Custis James, shifting instantly from the lead-weight of Nazism to the whimsy of Dr. Seuss. Amazing, isn't it?

Mr. Brown is an imitator extraordinaire of sounds. He can moo so well that a wide-eyed cow with blue horns looks on in stunned amazement. He can make the tick-tock sounds of a clock so convincingly that the clock changes its angle of repose out of respect. He is adept at the buzz of bees who, like the cow, look happily surprised by hearing their own sound emerge from a human mouth.

However, Mr. Brown’s most impressive imitation is thunder and lightning about which he gets so excited that he jumps up and down as yellow bolts zigzag around him. On the opposite end of the decibel scale is the silent kiss of two goldfish.

Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss) had a superb way of pulling listening children into his books. In Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You?, which is subtitled Dr. Seuss’s Book of Wonderful Noises, he encourages them to make the sounds along with Mr. Brown. “I think you ought to try,” he writes. And my son does just that, hooting like the owl and popping like a cork.

There is one odd thing about Mr. Brown that most adults probably haven’t noticed. Never once in the book does he open his eyes. Like an opera singer with hands reverently clasped and head slightly tipped back, Mr. Brown has abandoned sight for sound. Even when standing on the back of a purple horse, his eyes are shut tight, and he is totally engrossed in klopp klopp klopp.

Mr. Brown lives fully in the present, or more accurately, the auditory moment he himself produces. About such strange goings-on, the horse looks blissfully happy. So does Jordan.

I am not annoyed about having my concentration broken and my solitude taken away. In fact, there is something fundamentally right about it.

Bonhoeffer would have understood. He was interrupted numerous times during the writing of the Cost of Discipleship (which he composed in the late 1930s while running a seminary that the Nazis had declared illegal) and Ethics (which he wrote while deeply involved in the resistance).

Following his arrest in 1943, he read and wrote as much as possible in the enforced solitude of his cell. But he was often interrupted by guards, inmates, bombing raids, and work in the prison infirmary, taking the time to listen and to offer what help he could right up until the day he was hanged.

For example, on February 1, 1944, he wrote to his friend Eberhard Bethge about a terrible bombing raid on Berlin that had blown out the prison windows the night before. In the morning, some prisoners and guards had sought out Bonhoeffer for comforting. He wrote in his letter:

But I’m afraid I’m bad at comforting. I can listen all right, but I can hardly ever find anything to say. But perhaps the way one asks about some things and not about others helps to suggest what really matters; and it seems to me more important actually to share someone’s distress than to use smooth words about it.

Occasionally, Bonhoeffer broke off mid-sentence, writing “Enough of this; I’ve just been disturbed again” (May 29, 1944). But later he picked up his chain of thought as imperturbably as if nothing had occurred.

Similarly, the life of Jesus can be seen as perpetual interruption. I have often thought the disciples must have fumed at his inability to stay on schedule and get things done. Jesus would never have adhered to a prioritized things-to-do list. There was always one more child to hold, one more sick person to be healed, one more anxious person asking a hard question. Never impatient or self-absorbed, Jesus knew, as Bonhoeffer put it, “what really matters.”

And so my son and I finish Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You? The last sound he makes is the soft whisper of a butterfly, very soft and very high.
“Maybe YOU can, too, I think you ought to try.”
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