"The Lord Reigneth"

last year, a few weeks before my birthday, Isle of Iona

Just a few thoughts on turning 51 today.  All morning, I've been receiving birthday wishes on Facebook, via e-mail and text, telephone calls and even in person.  All week, the mail has brought cards to me, and there have been gifts at the door of my office.  It feels good to know that people are thinking of you on the date of your entry into this magnificent world! 

But you know, birthdays are funny things.  On the one hand, they mark the passage of time and point towards the inevitability of slowing down and eventually dying.  But more positively, they are a gift that allows you to look back with gratitude with eyes that see the places and times when God's grace has been at work in your life, whether you recognized it at the time or not.

John Wesley frequently reflected in his journal on the occasion of his birthday.  He often praised God for good health, for the amazing stamina that rarely failed him, and for innumerable spiritual blessings.  In 1784, as he turned 82, he waxed eloquent as he elaborated on his sense of well-being:

Today I entered on my eighty-second year and found myself just as strong to labour, and as fit for any exercise of body or mind, as I was forty years ago. I do not impute this to second causes, but to the sovereign Lord of all...; I am as strong at eighty-one, as I was at twenty-one, but abundantly more healthy, being a stranger to the head-ache, tooth-ache, and other bodily disorders which attended me in my youth. We can only say 'The Lord reigneth' While we live, let us live to him!

While his memory selectively skipped over the times when he was ill and in fact nearly died, Wesley nevertheless saw every birthday, indeed every single day as an opportunity to be thankful for God's abundant grace and the ways he saw that grace displayed in his own life, in the Methodist revival, and in the world at large.   Despite losing the love of his life due to Charles' intervention, despite theological battles with the Calvinists, the Moravians, and with Charles, despite persecution from people who hated Methodists, and despite an unhappy marriage with its attendant woes, John Wesley saw himself as someone blessed by God.  He knew that he had been gifted and called to be a unique voice within the Christian Church, and despite the cost, he counted it as privilege and blessing to follow Christ into the fields and into the homes of the poor as well as into fine pulpits of soaring cathedrals.

I have several chronic health issues that will not kill me even though they frequently make life uncomfortable, painful, or even embarrassing, but on this day, and on every day, I echo Wesley's words:  "'The Lord reigneth.'  While we live, let us live to him!"