It’s Multiplication and Not Division that Applies

This past week I clicked another mile on the odometer of life. Actually, I’m not sure if it’s a mile, or a thousand, or ten thousand… you get the point.

For all of my life April 25 has been a shared day. It’s a day that I share with my twin sister. My earliest birthday memories were of a shared event, a joint celebration, a party with community implications.

I highly recommend this.

While you had no control over your birth companionship, you do have a say in whether the key events and celebrations in your life are singular or corporate. Even a birthday can be a shared celebration.

Debbie Birkey is my twin sister. She’s five minutes older than me (this used to bother me, now I relish each second!), she’s lovely to the core, she’s talented, she’s a trusted friend and a wise advisor, and she is forever what keeps April 25 from being simply about me. It’s her day too. Her joy is my joy; her pain mine. And it goes both ways.

When we were dividing a cake this felt different than it feels today – today it feels like a great blessing and a sacred guardrail from any inclination to make any celebration simply about me. Even my birthday.

With this endorsement I invite you into this place. To a place of shared experience and shared celebration and shared victory and shared burdens and shared laughter and shared accomplishment and shared gifts and shared confession and shared moments and memories and calendars and delight and vulnerabilities.

The providential hand of God determined that from the moment I was conceived I shared my life. A shared womb became the trailhead for the rest of my journey.

This journey companionship is a good thing – a God revealing kind of thing. It’s really good.

Debbie and I both realize that our partnership is now largely delegated to Randy Birkey and Mary Wolgemuth respectively – but we will never, ever consider our birthday, or most any other day for that matter, as our day alone. We were born to understand that it’s multiplication and not division that applies when you share your life.

Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! ~ Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 (ESV)

Together. Stronger. Humbler. Accountable. Expectant.

Happy birthday, Debbie!

There are more candles, more memories, more grandchildren, more joy, more dreams, more love for Jesus… because I share this life with you.

I recommend it.