beauty{full}: being personal

It's my mom's 60th birthday today. Well, today where she is, not today where I am. And interestingly enough, one of the most beautiful things I've heard this week came from her. And no, Mom, it was not anything from that insanely long email you sent me about Bonhoeffer. In all pathetic honesty, the twins have so fried my brain that half of what was in there was completely incomprehensible to me, but thank you for believing in my remaining smarts, even if everyone else is aware that they have long since flown the coop.

Anyway, my mom was sharing with me about her plans for her sixtieth birthday. One of the things I love about my mom is her ability to throw herself a party. And this year she did just that: with a few dozen orphans. From the pictures, it looks like she loved every minute of it. In the middle of our conversation about crazy cake and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, she made a throw away comment about having another party at the deaf school with the orphan girl that she had gotten enrolled there because--get this--she had given this little girl her birthday.

I'm not sure why this struck me in the way that it did. Maybe it's because, to me, birthdays are intensely personal (on my birthday, I want to make sure that everyone knows it's about ME), and if I were to enroll an orphan in school and have to pick a birthday for their paperwork, I would more than likely just pick a random date. Not my mom. My mom picks her own birthday to share. And then she takes the time to celebrate it. With cake. That's selfless. That's personal. That's beautiful. And I can't get it out of my thoughts.

So I just want to take a moment to celebrate the sixty beauty-filled years of my mom's life. She makes me unbelievably proud and gives me endless food for thought (sometimes more than I can handle--cough, cough, Bonhoeffer, cough, cough). Most of all, I love being able to sit back and watch her grow in beauty more and more with each passing year. And I'm glad that this year she's going to show up in time to help me celebrate my birthday. Maybe we'll play pin-the-twins-on-the-gigantic-belly. But there will most definitely be cake.

{If you're looking for the rest of this series, all the links can be found here. Thank you so much for joining with me this month.}