Big Decade Birthday

Today we have another chance to celebrate the human thirst for liberty and to ponder who gets to enjoy equality and who does not. It's Bastille Day, the French equivalent (sort of ) of our Independence Day. I see this historical event as one of many that launched us on the road to equality. It's an uneven success to be sure. More of us in the first world enjoy more liberty than those in developing nations. But that thirst for freedom and equality found some expression in the French Revolution, and I could argue that much liberation theology has some rootedness in that soil (yes, it would be a problematic argument, I know).

Today is also my birthday.  This one is a big one:  I am 60 years old today.  I remember when others in my life have had this milestone birthday, and in my younger years, I remember thinking, Sixty--what must that feel like?

My spouse turned 60 last year, so yesterday morning, I asked him, and he said, "It just felt strange."  His birthday, September 26, was the day Hurricane Helene came to Appalachia, so his landmark birthday was strange indeed.

I have my usual birthday strangeness--oh yeah, it's my birthday.  It's a work day for me, which is fine.  I have never taken my birthday off.  If there's been celebrating, we've done it around work, and I'm fine with that.

I don't have special plans today.  My parents were in town for Music Week, so yesterday they came with us to Bristol for church, and then we all went for brunch at the restaurant of the hotel by the Birthplace of Country Music Museum.  It was lovely.  It was enough.

Turning 60 does make me think about how few turning of the decade birthdays are likely left.  I'm not at midlife anymore.  I don't know anyone who has lived to be 120.  But I certainly don't feel like old age has begun, and I realize how lucky I am not to feel my sixty years in every bone and fiber of my being.

Let me get ready for my walk.  Perhaps the birds have left me some birthday black raspberries.