God is Still With Me
It was perhaps my 5th birthday. Maybe my 6th. We had just moved to the neighborhood not long before. I stood there in a burlap sack, waiting to start the race. But I wasn’t all the way in and I was too something…little, clumsy, slow… to fix it. I called out to my dad to help me, but he was busy assisting the other kids. I waited for him patiently. Time seemed to lull, just as a wave peaks on the sand and seems to pause just a moment before it slides back into itself. But suddenly the tide rushed away from me as he signaled the race to start before I could get settled. I started crying. In the brilliant sunshine of a perfect sunny day I saw all of the kids hopping down the yard without me. Without me. Because I wasn’t heeded, and I was forgotten about. Such a little thing, and yet, when you are so little…it is a pretty big thing, isn’t it? They didn’t want to do the race over, so the birthday girl just was left out. And of course, I remember not wanting to continue with the festivities…struggling to collect myself. Classic, Collette, so sensitive. I sometimes wonder if just for a day a person with more average sensitivity could feel what I feel…I sometimes imagine it would drive them mad.
This is just one of many, many letdowns associated with my birthday, and the older I get, the harder it hits, and the less I want to dive into those memories again. Instead I’ll borrow Jess’s story. At least, the one written for the character Jess from New Girl. If you have ever seen her birthday episode it begins with Jess planning to hide away at the movie theater all day long to avoid her birthday. The stories on the silver screen were armor against disappointment. But it isn’t like a usual birthday avoidant situation. She puts way too much expectation on people she loves to celebrate her because her heart aches to be celebrated. But of course, her boyfriend who just isn’t quite with it promises to make plans for her special day. There are all kinds of shenanigans, just as you might expect from this show and other sitcoms like it. One of which is burned into my mind as they accidentally come across a picnic table decked out in brightly colored birthday fanfare in the middle of a park. Picture perfect. Of course, Jess assumes it is for her, while her poor boyfriend is dumbstruck and can’t find the words to tell her it was a coincidence before she dives into the treats. The look on her face when she finds a party of children come up freaked out over some lady “stealing” their birthday party. While it is played for laughs, I can’t help but feel that ache for her, and for myself, and for many of us who just are not celebrated in the way we long for. Simply put, Jess gave up and went to the movies after that.
I am reminded as well of a wonderful friend and mother figure who really wanted to be celebrated. She was really good at including people, hosting them and making them feel loved. Once she remarked that her mother was so particular about her parties, thrown by my friend every decade, but she was never thrown one as an adult. I purposed in my heart to throw her a party, even just a lovely dinner the next time a well-rounded number came up for her. She passed later that year.
These things have really stuck with me. And yet, I have no doubt that that friend is with Jesus at this very moment. She doesn’t care about a dinner party. She is being celebrated for who she truly is, unlike so many of us who don’t even know who we are. I suppose some would say birthdays are just another day on the calendar, and a few who would say they might be not just superfluous to celebrate, but wrong. And yet, why is it that I associate being cared for with being celebrated?
You may have read an essay or two of mine talking about the importance of cycles, the purpose in ritual or the strength in honoring the season we are in. I hold to it. Celebrations are a strong theme in the Scriptures. In one way or another they are a reminder of what God has done for His people. I’m not going to lie, I think we are just distractible enough that marking the calendar for different kinds of remembrances may be the only way to consistently bring our minds to God’s faithfulness. Does that mean I think that birthday celebrations are a reminder of God’s faithfulness to me? Perhaps. I can’t forget the words of one of those sweet elderly church goers I was so fond of when I was young. She said, “I love birthdays, they mean I’m not dead yet.” Of course that is the simplest way of saying, I am still here, I matter, I am valuable, God is still with me. And these celebrations say just that: God is still with me. They are not superfluous nor indulgent, participation in them is a mark of obedience, commanded by God Himself. Many such celebrations are found in Leviticus. A commanded holiday for the Hebrew people to remember what God has done. The one I wish to highlight is the Feast of Tabernacles. It was specifically for rejoicing before the Lord! It is a remembrance of their time of wandering in the desert. Of their forty years in the wilderness. And then in Deuteronomy 16:14-15 God told them their joy will be complete. “Be joyful at your feast–you, your sons and daughters… For seven days celebrate the festival to the Lord your God… and your joy will be complete.” Forty years then celebration. Sounds about right.
I was told I was too much, too sensitive, be it through a birthday celebration or lack thereof. But I’m beginning to truly believe that I am not. I’m just sensitive enough to make a difference in light of how my Creator designed me. And it may be that my timing is just right too. Moses knew something of just getting started at forty years of age. He was a prince, exiled as a murderer, became a shepherd, husband and father. And finally was called back across the wilderness to be not just a messenger of God, but a deliverer for his people. And after that…the scribe of the Pentateuch–the first five books of the Holy Scriptures that more than one people group claim as holy truth.
I’ll leave us here with this, a beautiful passage on time by Kell Woods:
“Time can never truly be contained. We try, of course. With ships’ watches and glasses filled with sand; with clocks and church bells. We name the holy days, the months, the seasons mark the turning of the year. We believe that, by naming time, we have captured it, forcing it to bow to us.
In truth. It is we that bow to it.
Even the tide will conspire, to a degree, offering an illusion of order, of timeliness. Ebb tide. Flow tide. Dead tide. And yet it, too, will inevitably forsake us, unwilling to be checked. Time weaves through the tides, and beyond them. Past the turnings of the moon, its silvery, changeable face. Light to dark, and back again. Past the falling leaves, the misty frosts, the warming sun.
An endless net is time, catching nothing.”
I feel this so poignantly this year–the elusive quality of time. It just slips away like the tide, just as it did on my 5th birthday all those years ago. And yet, my stubborn nature comes out as I will bow only to God. Time is in His control too. He has created it, is outside of it and sees me outside of it as well. Every version of myself He pulls back and just sees me as completely Collette. How I should be.
I wish I could see her too.
God, may time not intimidate me. May I find my true self in its merciless and relentless movement forward. May I feel chosen and loved this year. And by Your love, may I pour out to those whom I love and to my community ever more and more.
References and Inspiration:
“Birthday.” New Girl, season 3, episode 13, created by Elizabeth Meriwether, Fox, 21 Jan. 2014.
Woods, Kell. Upon a Starlit Tide. Tor Books, 2025. — passage on time and the tides.