Today is my golden birthday – 29 on the 29th. And, as is my MO on milestone-esque occasions, I got all serious and metaphorical thinking about how my life has been like gold. How, in so many ways, my days have been defined by God’s refining, beautifying, and gift-receiving love.

Let me explain.

First, gold must be refined. “I will refine them and put them to the test, just as gold and silver are purified and tested. They will pray in My name, and I will answer them. I will say, ‘You are My people,’ and they will reply, ‘You, LORD, are our God!’” (Zechariah 13:9)

God has been severely merciful in His refining – this year and in years past – so that I might know He is my God, my only God, and that I might tell Him so.

After it is refined, gold shines with beauty. “Your bride, my king, has inward beauty, and her wedding gown is woven with threads of gold.” (Psalm 45:13)

God has been fiercely loving – this year and in years past – in healing me from unattainable illusions of beauty to show me real beauty, beauty I have because I am the King’s bride.

I suppose the only thing left to do with refined and beautiful gold is give it away. “They took out their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh and gave them to Him.” (Matthew 2:11)

God has been wildly gracious – this year and in years past – to receive my life, as is, laid before Him, the only gift I have to give.

I’m not sure where or when all this golden birthday stuff started. Probably some gimmick by the gold people to get folks to buy more gold. Who knows? Nevertheless, today is my golden birthday and I am surprised and grateful at how God is refining me, beautifying me, and singing loudly about all these 29 years.

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“It was a dark and stormy night.”

“If you start any of your stories with this line right here,” my high school creative writing teacher said, slapping the chalkboard with a yard stick, “I’ll give you an F for the semester. It’s already been done.”

As the chalk dust settled and Mr. Viers moved on to the next topic, we students laughed nervously. Of course, we never started any of our stories with, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

That’s why I nearly had a conniption fourteen years later when I picked up Madeleine L’Engle’s beloved children’s book, A Wrinkle in Time.

“What the –“ I exclaimed as I read the first line of the novel. I slammed the book down on the table.

“It was a dark and stormy night? You’ve got to be kidding me!” I picked up the book and read the first line again just to be sure. “She’s the one! She said it first!”

After my momentary literary epiphany passed, I breathed in deeply, smiled, and dove into the book that, for some reason, never crossed my childhood path. In fact, I didn’t even meet Madeleine until twelve days after she died. And we weren’t introduced by her award-winning Wrinkle, but by one of her more obscure works: Walking on Water.

Nevertheless, there she was, in all her unassuming wisdom, quite pleased to meet me it seemed, being a fellow writer and artist. At that first meeting, we had peppermint tea together in the café where I found refreshment, honesty and truth in the way Madeleine talked about the seen and unseen world. Her brilliance and humor continued to pull me in as I soaked in her tales of what it means to be child and mother, artist and woman, storyteller and believer.

Not long after, I would pick up Wrinkle as well as the following four books in that series, drinking in the fantasy world of unlikely heroes and unexplainable phenomenons, tessering and unicorns.

Today, at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, the day before Ms. L’Engle’s November 29th birthday, a memorial service is being held to celebrate this exceptional writer. If I could, I would tesseract* myself to New York City; I would kythe** in agreement with those there who will honor this daring and unique voice who challenged us, inspiried us, and gave us some of the English language’s most memorable works.

“All of life is story, story unraveling and revealing meaning,” Madeleine said in her book Walking on Water. These words may not be as popular as her “It was a dark and stormy night” line, but in so many ways she is worthy of being remembered for enriching our lives by unraveling life’s most meaningful stories.

*Tesseract, a legitimate mathematic term, is used by Madeleine’s characters in the Wrinkle series as a form of extra-speedy time travel.

**Kythe is an old Scottish word Madeleine used to describe a type of intuitive communication between two people.

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“I know you’re probably wondering what I’m still doing in my paja-“ I said to Jason when he came home for lunch the other day. He had rushed in for a quick sandwich and I was finishing up a salad after a morning spent cleaning the apartment, getting groceries and toiletries, making phone calls, and exercising.

I desperately wanted to explain this to him; that my hair was disheveled and yesterday’s mascara raccooning under my eyes because I had been so busy. I had such a great excuse for my unkempt appearance; for what, to him, must have looked like laziness as I surfed the web and nibbled lettuce in my jammies. I needed him to know I wasn’t a slacker.

But I stopped myself before the last word fully came out. I butt in on my pride, my fear, my assumptions. I shushed that damned enemy who so often deceives us in the first person. I rudely interrupted a lifetime of lies within and without.

This didn’t just happen though, this silent treatment. It had something to do with a transforming power at work in me. Something to do with breaking free. Something to do with seeing myself, and everything else, the way it really is.

And, as a result, I’ve started having moments like this, moments where I catch myself the way you sometimes do when you trip. You’re half-way down, your hands scraped from the near-fall; but you caught yourself. In mid-trip you had the presence of mind to thrust your arms out. Catching myself these days has looked something like shutting my mouth and letting Truth finally get her two cents in.

I looked at Jason, my mouth clamped shut in surprise and relief. “That’s not what you were thinking, was it?” I finally said.

He put his arms around me. “Not even close.”

“Yeah. I didn’t think so,” I said, laughing and smearing tears on his shirt.

“Look at you,” he said, giving me a high five. “That’s freedom talk!”

After a few seconds of basking, I shrugged. “I guess I don’t have anything to say now. How was your morning?”

Later that afternoon, I would remember how many times I’d fallen on this battlefield. And how this time I caught myself and gave a screaming lie the silent treatment.

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I almost forgot to start playing Christmas music this year. And it made me sort of sad. Not just because I nearly missed my annual deadline (November 1), the day I anticipate for months, when I can finally singing along with “Jingle Bells” and “Silent Night” and “White Christmas”; but because there’s something else going on that made me forget.

Velocity.

An object in motion tends to stay in motion, says science. And I am, undoubtedly, in motion; a motion that practically kept me from pushing play on Harry Connick, Jr.’s “When My Heart Finds Christmas” album in time.

Speaking of time, time flies. And I fly with it. I feel the break-necking pace, and the urge to slow, as I teeter on my 29th year, as I look at my life in decades. But even as I try to cease, decelerate, and stop, I still fly.

And, more than ever, I hear my dad’s voice resounding: “It just goes by so fast.” He says that a lot, an echoing exhortation to his children to seize their days. I try. I really do. But I’m like you and everyone else, and November 1st almost came and went without a single yuletide melody.

But I caught myself that evening a couple weeks ago as I scurried around the apartment, tying up loose ends.

“It’s November 1st,” I said, going to iTunes and turning on “He Is Christmas” by Take 6. I soulfully crooned, alone in the apartment, at the top of my lungs, best as I could, while they sang “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”

Rest.

Don’t dismay.

Remember.

Comfort.

Joy.

Those are some of the words to the old advent hymn. Rest. And don’t dismay. And remember, too; remember the tidings of comfort and joy. As I did all of the above, I wondered if so many of the things I fear blurring by are not worthy of my slowing down to see in the first place. Things like the little stipulations I put on myself (i.e., Christmas music deadlines); unnecessary expectations, pressures and demands. Maybe as long as I’m slowing down for the essential things, things like breathing, laughing, and loving, I’m seizing life just fine. And the other things, like listening to “Let It Snow,” will fall into place.

Besides, no one knows when Christmas Day really happened. But it did happen. And that makes Christmas music appropriate every day of the year.

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