A Special Day

Three score and ten plus two is the number for the day.  It has taken me that long to get where I am today.  The way has been filled with enough towns in south Georgia to make a geographic crossword puzzle, more people than I can count who have invested their energies and prayers in me, and a family that has been a blessing every step of the way.  And, if the way I have walked these many years has any walking surface at all, it has surely been the mercy of God.  Why I am still on the journey when so many who started out with me are gone I have no answer. 

 

And, so I walk this way that God has set before me.  The past is filled with some successes, more failures, and an encyclopedia of lessons learned through experience.  One of the things I know on this marking day of the years is that I have more years to remember than I have years to work on dreams.  Even as I never knew what the future held, it is also true in this day that I do not know what the future holds.  I am thankful for the presence of God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit in this present day.  Our tradition tells us that God reveals Himself in these three ways, but the longer I walk the more I realize they are only the tip of the ice berg. 

 

Nine months before my birth, my life started.  My mother who through death recently slipped into a greater sense of God's presence cared for me, loved me, knew me, and prayed for me before I took my first breath of this earth's air.  She and all those who have shared this life with me are but a part of the provision of God for my living.  As I reflect back on the years of blessings, I pray that somewhere along the way this life so undergirded with the love of others and the grace of God has been a small blessing and encouragement to some other soul who is on the road toward home with me.  More years than I deserve do I embrace on this day and I do so with the greatest sense of thanksgiving.