Three Cakes in Four Days

Five years ago my 60th birthday felt like a consolation prize. This year I had to ask people to stop.

By the end of the weekend I said it out loud, laughing: “OK, stop. I can’t stand being loved this much.”

There was another cake in front of me, candles lit, people singing, a stack of handmade cards on the table. The third cake in four days, and I’d run out of ways to act surprised.

I turned 65 this month. A week out, I figured it would be a non-event.

You know how it goes. You tell everyone you don’t care about the day, and somewhere underneath you’re hoping somebody is planning something. A few months back I’d recruited some friends and thrown a surprise party for my wife’s birthday. She was floored. Great night. With my own milestone coming up (a milestone I’m not even a fan of), I was hoping someone might be cooking something up for me.

What was on the calendar was a camping trip. Our closest friends were taking their RV out the weekend of my birthday. We don’t have an RV, so my wife and I rented a cabin nearby to be in on it all weekend. I’d been hoping for a party. I told myself, okay, this will be something.

Cake after cake

It turned out I shared a birthday weekend with a young lady who was on the trip too. The second evening, they brought out two cakes. I didn’t see it coming. It put a big smile on my face, and I thought, well, that was nice. Figured that was the celebration.

The next night it happened again. More cakes, more candles, each of us leaning in to blow them out.

We drove home on the actual day, and my wife had our living room laid out with a plethora of gift bags and boxes for me to open. She’d baked me a batch of chocolate chip cookies. I picked dinner and a movie, and my wife, who does not love science fiction, sat through the original Stargate without one complaint.

Then Monday came. We had a potluck with our church community group, the one we meet with every couple of weeks. Toward the end of the night, out came another cake. Candles again. Happy Birthday sung to me again. Handmade cards from my friends. A couple more gifts.

I clearly have WAY too many images on social media.

That’s when I laughed and told them to stop. I meant it as a joke. It wasn’t entirely a joke.

The house I grew up in

You have to understand where I’m starting from. From the day I was born to the day I left home at 24, I never once heard the words “I love you” from my parents. Not once. I spent most of my adult life pretty shut down emotionally, because that’s what you learn to do when opening up gets you nothing. A long weekend of people loving me out loud, cake after cake, handmade cards in handwriting I recognized, is not a small thing for a man built the way I was built.

Sixty, at a bar

Here’s the part that matters, and it’s why I’m telling you any of this.

Five years ago I turned 60. I was living in Puerto Rico. I’d had some friends down there, we were tight for a while, but the friendships had started to fade by then. Nobody made any plans. I mentioned my birthday to one guy outside my usual circle, and he and his wife met me at a local bar for a drink. They did their best to make me feel celebrated, and I appreciated them for it. But I drove home that night feeling like I’d been handed a consolation prize.

I was low. Single in a new city, starting over at an age when you’re supposed to have it figured out. If you’d told me that night that five years later I’d be begging people to quit celebrating me, I’d have laughed in your face.

I was the man at that bar. I write an essay every Sunday for the man who's there right now. Subscribe and the next one will find you.

Still me, with less armor

I believe God brought me Mai (my wife) and brought me this circle of friends. I believe the work I did on my faith is what changed the man they ended up celebrating. For a long time that scared me. I liked being edgy, sarcastic Vic. I’d built a whole personality on the edge, and I remember thinking, “if I stop being that guy, who am I going to be?”

Turns out I’m still me. I still have an edge. I’m just not as nasty and mean-spirited as I used to be. Not as angry, either. Kinder and more patient than the man who sat at that bar on his 60th. Same guy. Less armor.

There’s a line in Joel where God speaks to a people who had watched life get stripped bare:

I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten.
Joel 2:25

I used to read that as a nice sentiment. I don’t anymore. The locusts were real for me. The lost years were real. The restoration didn’t come because I prayed for a better party. It came on the far side of a lot of work I didn’t want to do, the repentance and the forgiving and the letting people get closer than felt safe. But it came.

If you’re in the thick of it

So here’s what I want you to take from a man five years past one of the loneliest birthdays of his life.

If you’re dreading your own quiet birthday right now, certain this is just how it is for you from now on, you don’t know that. You can’t see where you’ll be a year from now. Two years. Five. I sure couldn’t. We all walk through dark valleys, and none of us can see the far end of one while we’re standing in it.

You don’t know where you’ll be in five years. I didn’t. Do the work in front of you. Let God do what you can’t. And don’t mistake one bad season for the rest of your life.

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Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.