Being Born

Most of us celebrate being born once a year on our birthdays. Perhaps we should celebrate much more often than once a year. After all, isn’t life full of rebirths. Aren’t we born again with every new discovery, every life lesson, every new dream? There is a kind of mystery to being born. Sometimes we resist it, looking fearfully at change. But mostly we embrace it and accept it as one of life’s gifts to us. Steven Charleston wrote these words:

I have had my fair share of doubts and spent my time in the long night of unknowing. I have enough scars to find someone to blame and have many memories I keep in the attic of my heart. But I count none of this as the measure of my life and spend as little time as I can rereading its sad story. For even from the deepest soil a new shoot emerges, a stubborn little plant called life, reaching up and out to find the waiting sun, drawing energy from the core of the very earth from which it was made. I am a light, not a shadow. I am being born, not dying.

I am grateful for that stubborn little plant we call life. I’m thankful that it persists, digging its roots deeper and deeper into the ground and reaching up toward the sunlight in a new day. How glad I am that I am not dying, but being born!