Happy Birthday To Me!

Dale sniped this for me on his way to Dawn Patrol in the moments before daybreak, and it was so pretty I had to assume God whipped it up specially for me on my birth day.  Which reminded me that I had been intending to write about gifts anyway. (And how like our Daddy to make us things like temporal art the size of the sky, which lasts three seconds and then bursts into day?!)

I was in either 1 Samuel, 1 Chronicles, or Psalms earlier this week (my uncertainty due to listening to a chronological reading plan via iPhone), and David was psalming about bringing a gift to the temple of the Lord. Bring the best, he said, or at least implied.  First I was intrigued by the word "gift" instead of the more familiar "sacrifice".  We know about that.  It's the thing we love best, usually ourselves or our selfishness, and we all know we have to bring it, slaughter it, lay it on the alter, weep a little weep, turn away, and not look back.  That's standard Christianity at its standard iconic-est. But gifts are a little different.  If I were to take a gift of the best that I had to, say, a king in a distant land, of whom I had heard great and mighty things, whom I respected, and whom I actually loved-- what would I take? After making a hasty assessment of my possessions, I discarded that idea.  Regardless of how much I like them, would he really appreciate a large black case full of microphones?  (Oops!  Grabbed my husbands possessions by mistake!)  Would he really appreciate a box full of books, letters, journals, paint, and fabric?

Possessions weren't going to cut it. Which left what I could make..... or who I am.  While I'm quite fond of my paintings and my dinners and my quilts and my blogs, all of them paled in comparison with myself as a human being.  Throughout all of history, manpower has been the deciding factor in most everything.  I marveled this time as I listened to Chronicles how desperately important it was in those days to have physical men at your disposal.  You were only as good as (i.e., only alive as) the army you could muster, and that depended largely on how many sons you had.  Suddenly the so-called Patriarchal Society makes more sense: if the only thing between you and extinction is human beings, you are going to have many wives, they are going to have many babies (hopefully sons), and those wives are not going to complain about it much-- they have sons who can till the ground and wield the sword?  They get to live!

The only way wars are won is by having boots on the ground; individual men and women who are willing to risk their lives buried in enemy territory as spies, storming the front line, or cooking to feed a legion. Every single person is important.  "For want of a nail, a shoe was thrown; for want of a shoe, a horse went lame; for want of a horse, a captain fell; for want of a captain, the battle was lost; for want of a battle, the war......" you know the saying.

I am valuable.  Far more so than anything I could ever own and give away. And the thought of walking into the temple before God and saying, "Um... I made an accounting and nothing I have is more valuable than me, so... here's my ear on the doorpost-- put an awl through it.  Make me Your slave," has given me an entirely new take on Christianity.  

Maybe that's another birthday gift from my Daddy: after 30 years of life on His planet, I finally understand that I am valuable. 

Thanks, Dad.