42

Randall was a friend who lived two doors down in our college dorm. The night before we graduated from Harding University, we were riding around in his pickup truck. He was 21 and on his way to grad school at Kansas State University. His dream was to be an English professor.

On a family vacation a few weeks after our graduation, Randall drowned.

Just a few weeks before Randall and I graduated, we watched the mass shooting at Columbine High School on live TV from the student center. Fifteen high school students (including the two shooters) died in the school.

Cassie Bernall, 17, was shot execution-style. Her parents later wrote a book about her. I read it in almost one sitting. That an ordinary teenaged girl could go to an ordinary school on an ordinary day and die from a bullet at point blank range haunted me then. It haunts me still.

Thirteen years later, I’d confront the same haunting feeling times a thousand when a lone gunman took the lives of 20 little children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

When I was 26, my granddaddy died of pancreatic cancer. In just a few weeks, he went from the biggest, toughest man I knew to twisted little stick in a hospital bed. In just one summer, the largest figure in my life was gone. He was 73 years old.

When I was in my mid-30s, one of our ministers dropped dead one November morning. He was younger than me when he died. Death stole him from a pregnant wife and three young children.

When I was 40, my dad got an aggressive and rare form of cancer that all of us expected would take his life within a year. He was 66 at the time of his diagnosis. Like Granddaddy, it came on so fast that Dad and Mom had to cancel vacation plans they’d been making for months to seek treatment. Thank God and the doctors at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Dad is cancer-free 16 months after his diagnosis. He had to go through hell to get there and his body will never be what it was before cancer.

At the exact same time that Dad got his diagnosis, my best friend’s mom also received word that she had bladder cancer. Her treatment was torture. She suffered for months before succumbing to the disease about the time my friend turned 42. I’m not sure she was more than 60 years old when she died, leaving four children and enough grandchildren to fill a passenger van.

Last night, my wife had the deep blues after a day of Christmas fun with her family. After an hour or two of being very quiet, she opened up: Her father looked feeble and her grandmother was so frail.

“I think this is the last Christmas I’ll have with Grandma,” she said. She reminisced about the many Christmases her Grandma and Grandpa (now long gone) hosted at their house. She told stories of when they were younger than our parents are now. They were the dynamic duo of Christmas cheer and hospitality.

The Grandma at Christmas yesterday–bent over, shuffling, and toothless–was unrecognizable. And she didn’t recognize most of her own family.

“What happened to us all? Where did the time go?” whispered my wife.

I could ask the same question today as I turn 42 years old.

But one of the gifts all these aging and dying people have given me after 42 years is this: HERE AND NOW.

I used to feel guilty when people like my friend, Randall, died so young while I lived on. But Randall wouldn’t want me to feel guilty; he would want me to be thankful for every single day of the years I got to keep living. When people make some comment now about how upsetting it is to be advancing through our 40s, I say: “It’s better than stopping in our 30s, isn’t it?”

To complain about getting older would be such a dishonor to those who never got the chance.

To complain about today–minor aches and pains, not having enough money, a sniffle or stomachache, the stress of work–is such a dishonor to those who are lying alone in cancer wards and nursing home beds.

So today I am thankful to turn 42 years old, but the number doesn’t really matter much. What matters is HERE AND NOW and all the blessings and wonder of this moment in time.

You’ve got your own moment. Celebrate it like the birthday that it is.

Grace and peace to you.