Birthdays

The more sozos I do, the more I realize the importance of celebrating birthdays. So many people in this world just feel that they are not worth anything. One way that they can be made to feel more worthy is to give them a birthday celebration. It’s really an easy thing to do. I think that sometimes parents get overwhelmed with life and blow off their children’s birthday. Now most children will say “that’s OK”. But it is not OK. It’s like saying you are not important to me. Please don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean you have to go out and spend a fortune on a big party and gifts; quite the contrary. Sometimes the best birthday is doing something for the child that you know that they really want, but you really hate. That shows a deep commitment of love.

I have two birthdays to celebrate this week. Julia Anne turned one on Jan 12th. What a blessing she has been this year, and what a blessing she will be. She was born only hours after Julia’s celebration service. She was born in our house with all the family present. We will always remember the joy of her coming. That will counteract the loss and over the years to come the joy will increase while the pain of the loss will, hopefully, lessen. Julia Anne has Julia’s guardian angle protecting her and that is a joy in itself. So she turned one this week. I sent her a Baby Huggums for her present. At one she will not remember much, but Anna Roan will tell her about it. Lisa took Julia and Anna to the zoo. I know that they had a good time. Meleah turned 11 today, Jan 15th. She wanted to go ice-skating with a friend. I know how much Jennifer and Sean didn’t want to go ice-skating. But they went ice-skating and then took Meleah out to dinner and then back home to watch her favorite movie. I sent her a card and her present in the mail, and I talked to her today. I hope she got the card. Everything was delayed because of the snow. But I know that my granddaughters felt honored on their birthday. I am so proud of my daughters. It is important. We have one more birthday in the family this month. Adair will be 13 on the 23rd of January. It’s hard to believe that she will be that old. But I know that her birthday too will be celebrated like it should.

So, what’s so important about celebrating life? Well, if you don’t celebrate life, you are really embracing death. One of the main issues I deal with in sozos has to do with identity. All to often the person has low self worth, or even self-hatred. As we begin to explore, many times it’s because one or both of their parents didn’t value them. They didn’t think that they were worth the time it spent to do things with them. Many times it started by ignoring, or just paying lip service to birthdays. I really believe that birthdays are more important to celebrate than any other holiday except Christmas. I don’t really see how you could celebrate Christ’s birthday and not celebrate the birthday of a family member. I wish that I had always thought that. I haven’t. I am sure that there were some of the girl’s birthdays that I just gave lip service to in the past. But I was protected by the fact that Julia always honored birthdays. It was just another way I was protected by Holy Spirit.

Well, I leave for Atlanta in the morning. It was a great day. I did another three sozos. They were all great. I can’t remember when I have had six good sozos in a row. It was really a good time. Tonight’s meeting was good too. Everyone did a good job speaking. It’s been great being down here, but I have to go back to work. I have eleven more workdays in the next fifteen days.