The Remembering

I accidentally forgot what day my birthday was on this week.

Well, inadvertently, as did my kids. They scheduled a celebration for a different night, thinking my birthday was on a different day (because that's what I told them, since I can't seem to recall my own birthday). No big deal. We’ll celebrate together on whatever day works best. Honestly, it doesn’t bother me one bit. The truth is, the introvert in me might just be looking forward to how the day will actually unfold.

When I get home from work on my birthday this year, it’ll be quiet.  My kids won't be around.  My Mom won't be, either. Just me and God.  I can’t think of a better way to spend the evening.

No cake. No candles. No party hats. Just some stillness, a soft place to land, and a heart full of memories. I'm not trying to elevate myself or my birthday into something sacred. But I do believe, deep down, that God knows the day He decided I would enter this world. I believe He saw value in that day, even if I didn’t always see it myself.

So, this year, I want to give that day back to Him.

I want to sit with Him and walk through old memories, not all of them easy. Some of them, honestly, are painful. There have been chapters I made a mess of. Seasons where I wandered so far I’m amazed He didn’t leave me there. Times when I sat in pits I dug with my own hands and still, still, He stayed.

That’s what I want to remember.  Not the years I’ve lived but the faithfulness He’s shown.  The goodness. The mercy. The undeserved grace.

My birthday won’t be about balloons or dinner reservations this year. It’ll be about a quiet house, an open Bible, maybe a candle lit in prayer rather than celebration. It’ll be about whispered thank-yous and soul-deep gratitude. And maybe, if the weather cooperates, a walk outside where I can breathe in His presence and thank Him for every breath He’s let me take.

The truth is, I don’t feel all that worth celebrating. But He is.

Once, when I was a teenager, I was driving a black Mustang my dad had bought for $400 and lovingly fixed up for me. I had added my own flair to it (this was the '90s, after all), a bold pink lightning bolt running down the side. To me, that car was freedom and fire. On this particular weekend, a friend and I were staying with family, there to watch my cousins wrestle in a state championship.

After the match, driving back along an empty stretch of gravel road, I wanted to show off a little. I wanted to see what the Mustang could really do.

I didn’t expect to lose control.  But loose gravel has no mercy on Mustangs, even if they have a pink lightning bolt.

In an instant, two teenage girls were spinning and skidding sideways into the middle of a cornfield.  A family cornfield, no less (sorry, Uncle). I never did confess the damage we left behind. But the part that still sticks in my mind all these years later is that the car didn’t roll. It should have. We should have been hurt. Or worse.

No one would’ve found us quickly.  This was the middle of nowhere, long before cell phones were a thing. But nothing happened. Not a scratch, not a bruise. Just two wide-eyed girls in a dusty cornfield with a whole lot of “what ifs” hanging in the air.

It was mercy. Plain and simple.

That moment is just one from a long list, a very long list, of times when my own foolishness could have left permanent scars, and yet, God said no. Not today. Not her.

This birthday, I want to sit with those stories. Not out of guilt, but out of gratitude. I want to remember just how often God has stood between me and disaster. Just how often He’s spared me from the full weight of my own choices.  I want to be the ones who says thanks.

It reminds me of a moment in Scripture.  Jesus was traveling along the border between Samaria and Galilee when He encountered ten men with leprosy. They stood at a distance, outcasts, unwanted, unclean, and they called out to Him for mercy. Of course, He gave it. He told them to go show themselves to the priests, and as they went, they were healed. Ten lives transformed, ten stories rewritten.

But only one came back to say thanks.

Through The Eyes Of A Thankful Leper

I don’t remember the last time someone touched me.  Not gently. Not kindly. Not without flinching.

Leprosy doesn’t just eat at your skin. It eats at your identity. Slowly. Cruelly. It begins with numbness. You don’t feel the burn from a cooking fire. You don’t feel the rock that gouges your heel. Then the wounds come and they stay and they spread. Before long, your body becomes something people fear to look at.

I've watched pieces of myself disappear, literally. Fingers. Toes. Feeling. Dignity.  Maybe worse than what the disease did to my body was what it did to my place in the world. I had to leave my home, my family, my life. The priests said I was unclean and God had turned His face against me. I wasn’t welcome in the temple anymore.

I lived outside the city, with others like me. People who coughed in the night and cried out when their skin cracked open. We were the walking dead, untouchable, unapproachable, and unwanted. If someone came near, we covered our faces and shouted out warnings:  “Unclean! Unclean!”

You stop being a person after a while. You are, instead, a warning.

We had heard the stories about Jesus. He touched lepers.  Yes, He touched them. Who does that? Who risks being defiled, contaminated, cast out themselves? But we heard Jesus had this way of breaking every rule that needed to be broken.

And then, He came.

We saw Him approaching the village, walking along the border between Samaria and Galilee. I didn’t expect Him to come our direction. No one ever did. People kept their distance from our little patch of forgotten earth.

But He turned toward us, ten broken men standing in the dust, holding more shame than skin on our bones. 

And, He looked at us.  Not through us. Not around us.

He didn’t flinch.  He didn’t step back.  He didn’t turn His face in polite avoidance the way others did.  He saw us.  He saw me.  

That was especially surprising to me, because I was a Samaritan.  The illness had forced us together. Jews and Samaritans, people who normally wouldn’t even speak to one another, now bound by a shared suffering. In the leper colony, all those boundaries blurred. Pain has a way of leveling people.

But still,  I was used to being doubly dismissed. First for my disease, and second for my heritage. Yet Jesus looked at me, a Samaritan, and didn’t look away.

Then came the command: “Go, show yourselves to the priests.”

As we walked, skin that had rotted began to knit together. The pain dulled. Strength returned. I watched my hands come back to life in front of my eyes. Hands I hadn’t wanted to look at for years.

The others ran ahead. I don’t blame them.  They had families to return to. Priests to show themselves to. A new life waiting for them that they had been dreaming of for years. For a moment, my feet turned with theirs. My heart raced with the hope of restoration, of everything I had lost being suddenly, miraculously returned.

But then, something stirred deep in me. A force I hadn't felt before, and it was something I couldn’t ignore.

I stopped. because it wasn’t enough just to be healed.  I needed Him to know.  I needed Jesus to know what this meant. What He meant.

He didn’t have to stop that day. No one would have questioned it if He kept walking. No one ever came our way, and even fewer acknowledged us as people. I was a leper. A Samaritan. I lived with layers of rejection.

But He had seen me.  I couldn't go another step without falling at His feet to say thank You.

So I turned around.  And I ran, not from shame this time, but with tears blurring my vision and praise burning in my chest. I ran to the feet of the One who had done what no one else ever had:

He saw me.
He healed me.
He loved me.

I collapsed before Him, overwhelmed and undone.  I didn’t have fancy words. Just worship. Just awe. Just the kind of gratitude that comes from knowing you’ve been rescued in both body and soul.  So I knelt low and I worshiped.

He looked at me and said," Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”  I knew something else had happened, something more than skin-deep.  There was a second miracle that day.

The first miracle healed my body.  The second healed my soul.

In the act of returning…
In the kneeling…
In the gratitude…

Something inside me was restored. 

I came to say thank you and I walked away whole.

The Turnaround

Not everyone turns back.  Ten were healed, but one returned.

I’ve thought a lot about that moment, the decision to stop, to turn around, to go back and say thank You. It’s easy to run forward into the newness, the celebration, the freedom of healing. God knows He's done a lot of healing in me.  But,  there’s something sacred in the pause, in the remembering, in the act of gratitude.

That’s the heartbeat behind how I want to spend my birthday this year.  I want to be the one who turns around.  I want to sit with God in the quiet of my living room, Bible open, memories laid bare, and offer Him the one thing I know I can give: my gratitude. My praise. My worship.

Not because everything in my life is perfect, but because He is.

I’ve seen Him show up when I didn’t deserve it. I’ve seen Him protect me when I was reckless, provide when I was desperate, and stay when I wouldn’t have blamed Him for walking away.  I’ve been healed more times than I can count, sometimes in ways I didn’t even know I needed.

So this year, the candles and cake can wait.
But the praise? That can’t.

This is my turnaround moment.
Not away from Him.
But toward Him, again and again and again.