I have just marked a birthday! At no time in my adulthood have I considered my birthday as party time. For many years in my adulthood, it was just a time of gratitude and reflection. Now, it is more than that. It is also now a time of recommitment to the responsibilities that the incredible circumstances of my life confer on me. It is a time of rededication to my spiritual journey, realizing that not everything will be palatable to me but everything is uniquely placed to make my life’s journey exactly as it was predestined.
I am currently in a place that I always thought would be scary and somewhat unnerving to be at: that place from which one can look back and see how far one has traveled...a place from which one can look forward and realize that the better part of the journey has been completed.
At my current age, I cannot get back the time that has passed - those times when I didn’t do what I should have done; times when I should have made those phone calls that I didn’t make; times when I didn’t make the choices that I should have made; times when I did not move to do something because I either thought I had plenty of time left or believed that I wasn’t yet in the prefect position to act...times when I kept silent when I should have spoken up.
What about those times when someone that I saw frequently just faded away and I did not try to find him/her because I wasn’t paying attention - or because he/she wasn’t someone that I had any interaction with? Or times when a peer stopped coming to class and I didn’t try to reach out to the peer? Or times when someone just stopped coming to church and I didn’t know why and didn’t ask what happened?
Could it just be that these are trivial things? Am I giving life and oversized shoulders to insignificant imaginations or am I just reminiscing because the final destination of my life is now closer than when and where my journey began?
I don’t know but...should it matter that these are the things I am thinking about instead of being the guest of honor at my own birthday bash? Maybe not...but to me it matters because I feel a strong sense of responsibility to leave my imprint in this beautiful world that I have been blessed to inhabit for as long as I have.
With wars, famine, corruption, ill-health, racism, religious persecution, heterosexism, gender discrimination, poverty, inequality and social injustice all around us, it would be easy for me to close my eyes or bury my head in the sand but my sense of humanity and spirituality lays on my shoulders a responsibility to love my neighbors as myself, to rise, to write, to speak and, even more, to act in the hope that, perhaps, just perhaps, I can through my actions create a ripple such as Julia Abigail Fletcher Carning meant when she wrote the words of her 19th Century famed hymnal:
Little drops of water
Little grains of sand
Make the mighty ocean
And the beauteous land
