Author’s Note: Today is my half birthday. While I normally don’t celebrate July 22, it carries a deeper significance this year. On Wednesday, Jan. 21, my brave and beautiful nephew Rhett ran into the arms of Jesus. He was six and a half months old. The next day, Thursday, Jan. 22 was my birthday.
You probably don’t remember what the weather was like or what you did six months ago today, but I do.
Rain beat hard and relentless against the world. I remember thinking it felt just – this rain – as I watched it from a car window. Our worlds had suddenly turned cold and gray so why shouldn’t the rest of the earth follow along too?
The thing about birthdays is that after years of practiced celebration, they’re completely ingrained in you. Like a cuckoo clock, something flips on and comes alive inside of us on that day. Birth day! Birth day! Birth day! it hoots. I remember probably a dozen times that day tilting my head and thinking, Huh – today’s really my birthday. Every time, it was like waking up and remembering all the facts at once. They crashed into line but couldn’t connect. Nothing made sense. Nothing felt real. I had never lived a day quite like this.
There came a moment later that day though, when my friend David looked at me from across the room. Can we go celebrate your birthday for a little bit? I wanted to say no. Celebration was the last thing I felt like and I don’t even remember how I agreed to it. Yet somehow we found ourselves scooting into a booth at a restaurant we knew well from college. Our dear friend Alexis who lived in Waco joined us too.
And to be fair, it wasn’t anything like any birthday celebration I had ever been to. We sat there stunned and wounded, spilling out tears and Rhett stories, telling memories from the last 24 hours and the past six and a half months.
We talked about how just the morning before I had texted them both to say how weird it felt to know I wouldn’t be spending my birthday with them. Thanks to years at Baylor together, we had grown used to throwing each other birthday parties. In fact, for my 21st birthday, they threw me such a ridiculous week-long extravaganza that we still tell stories about. David said it was like Rhett had known and wanted to bring us together.
A favorite writer of mine, Shauna Niequist writes this in her book Bread and Wine: “The table is where we store up for those days, where we log minutes and hours building something durable and strong that gets tested in those terrible split seconds. And the table is where we return to stitch our hearts back together after the breaking.”
We’ve spent years of birthdays together, probably had dozens of meals under that roof – and none of us would have imagined this collision of events.
It’s been six months to the day and still I’m drawn to that table and time. I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s a soft and safe moment on a cruel and cold day.
I know that really, there wasn’t any magic in the words we said, nothing supernatural in the food that we ate, but with so much spilled across the table and between us, something happened at that table. There in our deepest hour of our dark night, Jesus squeezed right into our booth and filled the spaces between us. It felt like holy ground.
On one of the most difficult days I have walked, the Lord showed up – in the faces of people I love, in the words and stories we shared, in the time we spent at the table. When I think about that day and those friends, about their exquisite kindness and love – the beauty of it nearly spins me undone.
What can separate us from the love of God? Nothing. Not the day, not the hour, not the circumstance. God meets us where we are. In the faces of others, in the stories we share, and yes, even in a booth at Chuy’s.
