A LITTLE LENIENCY ON MY BIRTHDAY

{Sorry this is a day late.  I meant for this to publish automatically yesterday on my birthday, but alas, my technology weakness is very
strong! Therefore, Happy Fourth!}

“Blessed be the Lord, who daily loadeth us with benefits, even the God of our salvation.”  Psalm 68:19

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here are Bible verses that warn us about adding to the scriptures, so I need to be very careful about how I say this.  And on top of that, the one I am about to add to was spoken by one of our spiritual super-men: no less than Job himself.  (I never can help giggling when people add that “himself” to people’s name:  it is such a surreptitiously subtle [and I say that knowing full well it is redundant] backdoor, cleverly cloaked manipulation of our slant toward that person; yea, that very person himself!)  Am I stalling here, or what?

            I just want to say that I know that what Job really said was, “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”  Amen.  That was pretty much the end of that quote.  But could I ask your indulgence in allowing me to make a little unauthorized circle here, and stutter a little?  Would it be okay with you if I say, “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, and the Lord giveth.  Blessed be the name of the Lord”?

            This year has been… well, let me just say different for us. We have suffered some financial setbacks, had to close our family business, had to depend upon others for financial help,  sold our house and moved into a rent house; I have come out of retirement, and Larry has had, because of his age, to be trained to do a totally different line of work after over forty years as an accountant: driving a tanker over the road all over the USA and Canada. None of these changes have been tragic; we are in many ways enjoying the serendipitous adventure of it all!

  However, I would not only be a Pollyanna, but I would be a lying Pollyanna, if I said there hadn’t been some losses we have suffered along with the adventure we have gained.  We are together only four days every month, we don’t get to have each grandchild here in the summer to enjoy his/her own special vacation with Boss and Nana; and we aren’t taking family vacations anymore.  (Well, one of us is “vacationing “ three and half weeks every month, if you count looking out the window of a fourteen-wheeler as he whizzes past “Welcome to New York,”  “Welcome to Utah,”  “Welcome to Ontario, South Carolina, Louisiana, Quebec, Tennessee…” )

Having said that, let me hasten back to the reason I am risking being struck by lightning.  The Lord certainly does give, and He certainly does take away, but if we stop there, it makes it sound like the end of the story, and that’s just wrong!  Even in the book of Job, it is wrong.  That was not the end of his story.  “After Job had prayed for his friends, the Lord made him prosperous again and gave him twice as much as he had before… The Lord blessed the latter part of Job’s life more than the first…After this Job lived a hundred and forty years; he saw his children and their children to the fourth generation.  And so he died, old and full of years” (Job 42:10, 12,16).  This sounds to me like the Lord did a lot more giving to Job after He had done that taking away.  

You see, it is my birthday.  Since I am an American, my birthday finds itself— every single year— strategically lodged up next to summer’s biggest bash-day.  There is every excuse in the world for folks to forget about my birthday in the rush of holiday preparations for barbecue and time on the water with family.  There is no end to the graciousness I could bestow upon that slip-up!  Not only that, but it also falls very near the first of a month, and I don’t know about you, but I always have trouble recognizing when a new month sneaks in upon the one I had gotten so used to for the past four weeks. So people have all kinds of reasons (not just excuses!) to forget about the day of my birth.  Good reasons!

But they don’t!  In fact, I am being fed meals by six different people— six separate occasions—

 for my birthday this year.  This is not even to mention all the gifts I have been given by these and others.  People just keep calling and asking to help me celebrate.  I am overwhelmed with the blessedness of this!  And this isn’t even a landmark birthday!  So much love!  So much honoring!  So little deserving!

Surely now you are thinking of how you, too, are sometimes just overwhelmed with unexpected blessings. I know you will have to agree with me that there is a lot more giving on the Lord’s part than taking away.  How can we ever believe the end of our story will end with the taking away when for all these years of our lives, there has always been some more giving after the taking away times? And when we start bemoaning our losses ( and yes, I know we have some losses that are REAL and shouldn’t be dismissed or diminished), shouldn’t we ask ourselves if really and truly, we aren’t way ahead?

I just can’t help thinking that even if it didn’t get recorded, Job is bound  to have said it my way at the end of his life.