Do you know, really know, what you are doing and where you are going?  Reading in the third chapter of Ecclesiates this morning, I was struck, again, by the enormous tension in which we live our lives, perched as they are between being and non-being, existence and non-existence, tottering on the edge of time and destiny.  And who can resolve this tension?  Who can overcome this apparent, as Albert Camus put it, absurdity, that we are born to live yet born to die?

     God, says the author, God.  It is God who shapes the world, God who forms space and time, God who moves through the temporalities of our lives, God who grants meaning to the puzzle of existential absurdity.  It is the eternality of God, he continues, it is the eternality of God that undergirds the transience of our days, the evanescence of our months and years.  It is God's presence, he opines, God's continuing presence of vision and design that informs the cosmos.

     And so today, as I think about my birthday, I think about Ecclesiastes's observations about the rhythms of life, the steadfastness of the patterns that define existence:  birth and death, laughter and sadness, planting and uprooting, gathering and scattering, and more.  I think about my mother, I think about my father, once here and now not, and I think about my siblings and oldest friends, still here, thankfully, still walking in the everpresent and ever unyielding planes of existence.

     And I ponder that from which it all has come.  I'm grateful to have experienced what I have, humbled by the weight of the life given to me, moved, and deeply, by its seminal mystery and wonder:  I'm here.
     Here's to birthdays, here's to meaning, here's to God.