Month: March 2026

The redemption of March 22

St. Patrick’s Day 2026

Today marks the beginning of my 74th trip around the sun. This past year has been as eventful as ever. This will be my second birthday shared with Mary, who herself is embarking on her (mumble, mumble)th season.

I have had a mixed relationship with March 22 in recent years. I have always been tickled to share my birthday with William “James T. Kirk” Shatner, sportscaster Bob Costas, and Werner “Colonel Klink” Klemperer, not to mention (looks it up) Reese Witherspoon, J.J. Watt, Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, James Patterson, M. Emmet Walsh, Marcel Marceau and Chico Marx.

But then five years ago the date was ruined, forever I thought, by the death of Willow The Best Dog There Is™ on my 68th birthday. I knew my birthday would never be the same, now that it was a marker of my best canine friend’s departure more than my own arrival.

Sure enough, the next three March 22s were somber days, especially after the even deeper loss of my beloved Red, who had been my partner for close to 26 years. Nothing, it seemed, would restore any sense of happiness to my natal anniversary.

Then a sweet woman offered me a hug one fateful Sunday morning. A week or so later, during coffee after church, I happened to mention to a friend that my birthday is March 22. A voice popped up behind me, “Why, my birthday is March 22!” It was the sweet woman who had hugged me. We talked about what a fun coincidence that was, and it was another thing that led to other things that soon caused our fellow parishioners to start calling us “you two lovebirds.”

And so the reputation of March 22 is redeemed in my eyes. That one year is sealed as my worst birthday ever — God forbid there ever be a worse one — but I’ve discovered it is still possible to have a happy birthday after all, especially since now it’s a celebration of the woman who hugged me back to life.

W.B.’s Book Report: Don’t Waste Your Life

I think I bought Don’t Waste Your Life by John Piper in part because of the bonus DVD, which is still tucked in an unopened sleeve in the back of the book. I have been tracking all of the books I’ve read since 1994, and although this book has been on my shelf since shortly after it was published in 2003, it does not show up in my “Books Read” file. (I only record books I have finished.)

The dog ear on Page 72 is evidence that I started to read it somewhere along the way and made it nearly halfway through, and something on that page resonated with me. I didn’t write anything on the page, so it could have been something under the heading on top of the page — “Pain and Pleasure As Ways to Make Much of Christ” — or further down — “How We Handle Loss Shows Us Who Our Treasure Is” — or even that section over on Page 73 — “Wasting Life by Running From Pain.”

Piper is a Minneapolis-based preacher and one of a handful of authors who find their way into my pastor friend’s sermons from time to time. The first time he mentioned Piper, I may have thought, “Hey, I think I have a book by that guy,” and after much rinsing and repeating, I finally reached up and pulled it down. Of course it has been worth the effort.

The dog ear is two-thirds of the way through Chapter 4 of 10, “Magnifying Christ Through Pain and Death,” which reaches into Paul’s letters to make the point that how we die defines us as much as how we live.

“The way we die reveals the worth of Christ in our hearts,” Piper writes. “Christ is magnified in my death when I am satisfied with him in my dying — when I experience death as gain because I gain him.”

I’ll always remember a story from the funeral of a friend’s 13-year-old son who was dying of cancer. They sat down with their pastor to break the news that there was nothing more the doctors could do; he would be gone in a few days. The young man flashed a huge grin and teased the clergyman, “I’m going to meet Jesus before you do!”

I am in no hurry to die by any means, but when the time comes I hope I will face it by pointing people to Christ. Of course, every big change carries a little fear of the unknown, and death is the biggest change since we emerged from the womb, but I also trust God. As the plaque on my kitchen wall says, “I trust the next chapter because I know the author.”

Equinox blessings

The forecast is for spring. With last weekend’s snowfall measured in feet, the weather people are predicting high temps in the mid 30s to upper 40s for the foreseeable future. The storm of April 2018 haunts us with the guarantee that it still could snow, but not before this snowfall does quite a bit of melting over the next 10 days.

And so it seems a grand time to throw a spring equinox. We hereby declare that the sun must stay above the horizon longer each day than below for the next six months.

May chlorophyll-green invade and conquer the land. May the sun yield sunflowers and coneflowers and wildflowers beyond our ability to count. May birds nest and fledglings fly and children run and dirty their knees. May the land burst with bounty enough to keep our bellies full through the next season of winter, months from now.

Let bandshells in town parks everywhere sprout music of all shapes and sizes. The music of spring and summer is joy joy joy to the world — let heaven and nature sing!

I look across the yard and into the woods and see gray and white. The only color is from the lawn chairs, and even there you could not sit without brushing away a cushion of cold, wet white. But last Saturday, before the storm, a fresh green glow was starting to emerge from the ground, and no doubt it waits beneath the snow and will be even greener after it quenches its thirst on the spring melt.

“Yeah, right, it sure looks like the first day of spring,” leers the cynic. But he can’t deny the truth: It is, indeed, the first day of spring. We survived another winter, and the season of light is upon us.