I am sitting here reflecting on the recent celebration of my 56th birthday, reliving the kind words and wishes for happiness from many friends and family members. It was a good day, and I enjoyed it very much. But, if I’m being honest, birthdays for me are always a bit melancholy. Not sad, mind you, but certainly a time for reflection. And as I’m sitting here reflecting away like mad, it occurs to me that birthdays are also a symbol of transition, of movement, of progression.
My 56th birthday is actually the beginning of my 57th year. I have traveled around our sun 56 times, and I am currently at the beginning of my 57th trip. Each of those trips around the sun means I have traveled about 584 million miles through space. Pretty impressive, huh? I used to think those trips around the sun always brought me back to the same spot in the space-time continuum, so my travels really didn’t amount to much. Like the cyclist who only rides a stationary bike, I always arrive at the same place from which I started. But that’s not quite accurate, is it?
While the earth is orbiting the sun, our sun (along with the entire solar system) is orbiting around the galactic center, and our galaxy is also moving at a pretty good clip through space, so the one thing that is absolutely certain in this life is that none of us end up where we started. We arrived on the scene in one specific place in the universe, and by the time we depart we are billions of miles away in another part of the universe. We are literally, every second of our lives, moving on. It only seems we are static because we lack the reference points to see, to feel, the movement.
I wonder if the same is true for us spiritually? When we are born, we lack a spiritual identity except the one that says we are made in God’s image. As we grow into ourselves, as we orbit around first our families, then friends, and then classmates, colleagues, acquaintances and strangers, and as those grounds also orbit around still other relationships, we gradually find ourselves moving into other places spiritually. The Christian faith asserts that God has a hand in these movements, these orbits. We quote scriptures, such as Jeremiah 29:11 (“I know the plans I have for you . . .”) and Ephesians 4:11-16 (“He called some to be apostles . . .”), to affirm our sense that God is in control of our orbit. But we also are in control and have the opportunity to, “Work out [our] own salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12).
Our ability to exercise control, though, doesn’t mean we can ever stay still, or that we can ever finish right where we started. We can’t, anymore than I can return to the place in the universe where I was born. That place is far behind me now, for better or worse. No, whether God retains control (lordship) of our lives, or we reserve that honor to ourselves, we will still be on the move. Somewhere. We may lack the reference points to see our movement, but we’re moving just the same. The question is, are we moving towards or away from the one who brought us into existence by his word?
