Dan’s birthday is today. He is 60-some years young. We were with two different sets of family in two different locations this past week. A rousing chorus of Happy Birthday was sung in both places. And it dawned on me what keeps Dan so young.

See if you notice what I noticed.

Yep, he’s the one at the bottom of the pile of grandkids.

During the time it set under our Christmas tree, an Amaryllis stalk sprouted in the small box. No water, no light, no nutrition. A squashed, bent-over stalk.

“I bet our neighbors are jealous of our sidewalk,” my husband commented.

Dan and I added on and refurbished our home last year. Before they would approve our permit, the brilliant city planners required we put in a sidewalk. At our expense.

I was on a roll. The words were hurtling off my fingertips onto my laptop screen like so many tennis balls sputtering out of a launching machine gone haywire.

I think we do a fairly good job of hiding ourselves from ourselves. Recently I took up a challenge issued by A.W. Tozer designed to help people discover what they might not otherwise know about themselves.

In her book Be the Gift, Ann Voskamp wrote about a close friend who was losing her battle with cancer:

My friend Elizabeth was dying, and she still hadn’t any idea how much time she actually had to live. Maybe knowing you’re dying changes everything—while actually changing nothing. Because we all know it every single day, whether we have a diagnosis or not: We all get one container of time—but no one gets to know what size that container is.

Last Christmas season, Dan and I established our first holiday tradition as newlyweds. We performed a random act of kindness, a service, or presented a gift on each of the first 25 days of December.

Dan and I had a recent conversation with one of our granddaughters who’s having a hard time at school. She moved to a new town after the school year started and a couple of the boys paid some attention to the ‘new girl’ … and now the popular girls don’t like her.

I opened the shades to discover a young buck lying under our mountain ash tree. He shouldn’t be so comfortable living in town where there are people and traffic.

But there he sits during this crazy busy holiday season—in no hurry to decorate anything, purchase anything, wrap anything, or be anywhere.

Dan hung floating shelves, and I collected photos, ordered prints, and spray-painted old frames. Our family photo wall with his/her kids and grandkids is well underway.