36 years ago my mother did a wonderful thing for me. She drove with my father in below zero weather to Fairview Southdale Hospital and set me free. My memories of the event are skethcy at best, but she remembers much better.
I was supposed to be a New Year's Baby, but I didn't want to enter the below zero Minnesota Winter from my cozy spot in the womb, reports say. But there is only so long you can procrastinate birth, so January 16th, 1970, there I was.
Helpless, fragile, and needy I was (unbeknownst to me) placed into a world torn a part by Viet Nam, seduced into a sexual revolution, and where racial tensions were still very sore as a nation was still trying to figure out how MLK could be assassinated.
Babies are little people who force you to think the future when you see them - they have no past on Earth. With children come hope. "Maybe this child will take the torch and keep going with it, maybe to places the previous generation enver thought possible."
I know that my parents had hope when I was born. And in many ways, I know that I have not disappointed them. I know that one of their hopes was that I would make my own decisions, even if they were not the same decisions that they would make. WOW!!! If anything captures faith it is that.
They have given me many tools for the journey and I have learned how to use many of them. Some of those tools, however, sit in the shed unused. I have also gone out and got some tools of my own - strange and unfamiliar tools. Newfangled tools that don't make sense to them.
I know that I have wandered outside some of the preferences of my parents, and it must feel to them at times like the labors pains are never going to end. It is one thing to let the baby out of the womb, but it is another thing to let the baby out into the world making decision for himself. I am grateful that my parents that they give advice as they should (I need it), give me the freedom to make my own choices and, experience my own consequences, and are guaranteed there when I blow it - no questions asked. I've got a no lose deal going on here.
God, thank-you for using my parents to bring into this world, bring me up in this world, to release me into this world, and to love me in this world.
5 comments:
Your parents sound wonderful. I was talking to my mother the other night and she said that there was no way she could look back on her life and say that God hadn't had a hand in it. As a believer married to a "drunk," she raised 4 children, 3 of whom are still living and still following God. We didn't always do what she wanted, or even maybe what was right, but we are all following Him now. All that, while friends who were "equally yoked" and leaders of the church had children who left the church as soon as they left their parents' houses. I think a lot of it is because she exhibited the same kind of love for us as your parents did for you. The kind that teaches us as best it knows how, then sets us free to make our own way.
Happy Birthday! Folks everywhere are taking off work to celebrate with you!!! What a guy!
Happy Birthday! I guess Minnesota is as close to going back to the womb as you're gonna get! Enjoy!
Happy birthday, dear Faji---taaaaahhhh! Happy birthday day to youuuuuuuu! (to be sung very operatically)
We love you and thank God for you. Gail's voice message about your school stuff made us cheer! We're so proud of you!
cool tribute to them on your birthday....hope it was a happy one!
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