You want to read this: How to Grow Older

Here’s to blowing out another round of candles on the cake today and beginning another spin around the sun! Growing older is this gift that makes all the present moments sweeter. 

It’s joy that reverse ages us. 

There was a rainbow arching over our cornfields last week and I ran across the lawn to snap a picture of its bowed promise, and the summer rain felt like resurrection on my face and I laughed happy and I could feel it:  It’s joy that reverse ages us. 

If your eyes keep looking for loveliness, you keep from growing old and only grow more lovely. 

He and I sat on the porch later and rocked in the old rocking chairs, watching the shimmering rhythm of the rain dance with the sun all across the hollyhocks in the garden, and down the front walk, and I turn to see him smiling and I can testify to what I saw: If your eyes keep looking for loveliness, you keep from growing old and only grow more lovely. 

After dinner last Sunday, when we wander down the back lane by the river, down by our wee flock of sheep grazing in the blush of a summer sunset, one massive bald eagle takes to the air from somewhere the other side of the willows, takes our breath away, and there wasn’t time to take a picture, only time enough to take in all this glory.

Let something take away your breath, and you let awe of God take away your age. 

We shake our heads, astonished.

Let something take away your breath, and you let awe of God take away your age. 

I’m thinking this come Monday, when the Farmer and I clean up after chores and head to the visitation of a kind, neighboring farmer who lost his life under a tractor. This is a story I know. This is a story I desperately wish I didn’t know, that they didn’t know, that no other farmer’s daughter ever has to know. This is a glorious world that holds the most bewildering grief. This life aches with beauty and with pain. 

My Farmer slips his worn hand through mine, steadying me, as we wait in line to pay our deepest respects. We nod to farmers we’ve known and lived beside for the last 30 years and think of how we are all looking older than we imagine we are, how time and love and living is making us all real. All our gentle wrinkles are time wearing away all that doesn’t matter until we are left with the essence, with what will really matter in the end.

That glorious flash before your eyes just before you die is actually the thing called your one and only glorious gift of a life. 

We linger with all these framed pictures of different seasons of one man’s life, when he first got married, when he held his first baby, when he walked his first daughter down the aisle, when held his first grandbaby, when he gathered with his family for the last time, but never imagined it was the last time. 

“What do you want in all of your photos in the end, when they set out the picture frames of the story of your life at your visitation, what do you want your life story to say?” I quietly ask the Farmer on the way home, cornfields blurring by. 

“That we really loved God… that we really loved our people… that we ran our race really well because we ran it in the right direction,” he measures his words, feeling the weight of our one life, and he reaches out for my hand. 

What changes your awful days is awe of God. 

And I take it… take all these moments and take none of this living for granted because this life is ending and what matters is what direction every one of our days take, that we take joy, take life as an astonishing gift, take it deeply personally, all this love of God. 

At this point, this is what I know as I blow out a small blaze of candles today: 

That glorious flash before your eyes just before you die is actually the thing called your one and only glorious gift of a life. 

You can give way to the grief — or you can give thanks that you loved enough to grieve.  

What changes your awful days is awe of God. 

If you turn the right direction when you’re down in the trenches, you can still see the stars dance. 

You can give way to the grief — or you can give thanks that you loved enough to grieve.  

We love as much as we accept that we are loved. 

Live fully and your life has no room to fear death. 

The more you open to prayer, the more you close your soul to being perturbed. 

You begin to know the answer to your prayers when your prayers begin to simply be these two words: Thank you. 

The more you open to prayer, the more you close your soul to being perturbed. 

Because you’re made by the Word, life isn’t about trying to find yourself, life is about opening to the Word Himself to write your story.

You only get to live once on this side, and you won’t get it right, so once won’t seem good enough — but if you let Jesus be all your right, you get to live the best for all eternity.   

Pray, lament, give thanks, and hold space for the tension, and God gives you Himself. 

When the candles blaze today, when I blow them out and all the years of smoke clears, that will be the invitation, that is always the invitation: Relax into the gift of all this, that it is a rare and miraculous gift to even get to exist. 

Frame your days with sacred prayer, and certain gratitude, and your life will be a masterpiece of love. 

Frame your days with sacred prayer, and certain gratitude, and your life will be a masterpiece of love. 

Begin each day with sacred prayer and intimate communion with God,  and end each day with thanks for the gifts and gratitude to God, and you live your days with more joy, with more awe and wonder in God! 

And you find your own life rewritten and restored and re-storied, into a life that is the kind of picture of meaningfulness you want to see in the end. 

The fresh grace to begin a new year, to begin again now in this present moment – is the gift that cannot be missed.  

It happens – when you blow out the candles, something can alight in you. 

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