The perfect birthday gift #1

This weekend I celebrate another birthday. For what it's worth I will be 43 years old. What do you do to mark such a momentous occasion? I mean, come on, its hard to get all giddy and excited about middle age. Ponies and balloons really don't light my fire anymore. Someone asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I pondered this question for a while. At first I came up with all the Miss America pageant cliches: world peace, no more wars, an end to childhood hunger. Then I thought no, midlife is nothing without a crisis. What would I want that woulde ease that growing since of anxiety I have sometimes about getting old (do you realize in 7 years I will qualify for an AARP card!!!) In a flash of self-absorbed brilliance I came up with three perfect gifts.

Gift 1 - A Time Machine
Some people might look at this gift and think about all the great historical events they would want to visit. Not me. My time machine has one purpose and one purpose only: to ferry me back to those events in my life that need to be fixed. The list is rather long, unfortunately, but doable. At last count I identified around a dozen key mistakes that if corrected could make me into the man I always wanted to be. All I have to do is travel back in time, make a different choice or, in one instance, just keep my mouth closed, and shazzam, life is perfect. The whole process should take 20-30 minutes, which is about the average time we use gifts anyway. Then that little machine could take its rightful place in the corner and start gathering dust and my dirty clothes.

I was pretty excited about the mere prospect of this gift (purposefully ignoring that such a machine does not exist in real life) when a feeling of unease hit me. This whole fantasy was predicated on the belief that by fixing those mistakes I would be perfect, or near perfect. What if, heaven forbid, I fixed those dozen bad decisions only to discover that I made 12 equally horrible choice later on in life. Then I would have to go back in time and correct those mistakes. And then correct the mistakes I made after I fixed the second set of mistakes. It would never end. My life would be consumed by this process. Stupid time machine!

I had another realization as I was imagining all of this. If I had such a time machine not only would I not be able to fix every mistake in my life but I would be missing out on one of God's greatest gifts: grace. I'm human and I am going to make wrong decisions and bad choices. Even with a time machine I will never be perfect. But I don't have to be (though God really wants me to give it my best shot). God loves me even with all my imperfections, perhaps even because of them. Grace is love that comes not to us not because we have earned it, but as a gift freely given. Come to think of it, that's a pretty good birthday gift. Better than a time machine...though if I had only kept my mouth shut that one time...