Today is February 28th!

It isn’t my birthday, nor will it be tomorrow.

If this were a leap year, I would have a gloriously whole 24 hours to call my own, but every three out of four years, I imagine my birthday being in the misty ether between the end of one month and the beginning of another.

I remember wanting to stay up until midnight when I was a kid, just to claim a nano-second of confetti and fireworks between the two, but I could never catch it quick enough before that birthday thief, March 1st bullied its way in and that was that. So, I’ve grown used to being born on this special and peculiar day where, for 75% of my entire life, I will have celebrated a birthday betwixt and between the two.

That has me thinking about other ways that we all experience the not quite here, and not quite there times. Transitions are a part of life, and while I think we tend to give a lot of attention to the beginnings and ending of things, that’s not where most of life takes place, is it? How we get from here to there tells so much of our story, full of triumph, heartache, victories, failures and lots and lots of moments where we don’t know where we are, exactly. We’re kind of betwixt and between the two…

Jesus lived every one of his 33 years as a human being in a place of “in-between.”  If he was, as scripture teaches, fully God and also fully human, that tells me he also knew inner conflict!  He had knowledge of the glories of Heaven yet chose to spend what had to have felt like an eternity of years on earth. And he didn’t just drop in and out in an ethereal cloud between the two; he embraced the full human experience that ended in a tortuous act of betrayal by those he loved enough to die for.  He knew the plan – he never lost the plot – but that doesn’t mean he got a pass from experiencing the hard in-between realities of life.

I’m not sure why my heart has gone this direction on this evening of my almost-birthday. I’m wondering if there are some who may be feeling the discomfort of transition – of being not where they began, but not where they are meant to be yet. If so, take heart!

There is plenty about being a Jesus follower that I haven’t learned yet, but some things I know deep in my birthday bones, and one of those is that we are never alone on this journey, no matter how it feels. He was there in all of our beginnings, and he will certainly be there at the end of our days. But how incredible is it that he hasn’t just checked out of our in between places, and still chooses to be with us here and now.

I really love him for that.

Betwixt and Between with you,

Shellie