You were so excited this morning. You bounded out of bed and exclaimed “It’s my birthdaaaaaaaay!” as you wrapped your arms around me. Even though your party isn’t until later this week (and you have to share it with your parents), you were just thrilled with the fact that today you turned eleven. And you got to open one present. You were pretty pumped about that.

You still beamed when I picked you up from school. You didn’t even mind when we went to the church to kill time before we picked up dinner. You picked a barbecue place for dinner. The present you got today was a Lego version of Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing. The movie that you picked was Avengers: Age of Ultron, which is definitely the worst Avengers movie but you’re very dedicated to tackling these things chronologically. Three choices that highlight that you are definitely my son (there are many ways you are your mother’s son as well). It’s been a good day.

I have been writing these birthday letters to you for a decade now and this might be the first time that I feel a hefty dose of melancholy as I reflect on you being another year older. There is change around the corner. You are still very much a kid, but for the first time I really feel the finitude of those days. You are in middle school now. You will be starting in my youth group over the course of the summer. And I just have the sense that it’s going to sneak up on me. I won’t realize that you’ve crossed that threshold into adolescence until after the fact. Growing up is good. I want you to grow up. And there is part of me that is just not ready for it. Not yet.

After helping getting the boys ready and off to school, I begrudgingly trudged (betrudged?) outside for a run. It’s been a tough 13 months in that department; as it has been in most departments of our lives. Covid and work and being a parent have made it a sporadic discipline and it shows. I have put on more weight than I would like. I’m a little slower. I used to be able to go 5-7 miles with no problems, but now I muster 3-4 and will walk if there is an especially grueling hill. I am a runner, but I am not a good or especially consistent runner right now.

Yet I go outside. Not so much for the pudginess around my midsection but because my spirit needs it. It keeps me sane. It keeps me grounded. I started running because my dad did it. I still remember writing in my 8th grade English journal about how we ran 4 miles several times over Christmas break and my English teacher wrote in red ink: “Is this a good idea?” I started because of my dad but it became something of my own. I loved it because I could go far. Because I found a community of oddballs in track and cross country. Because it could quiet my often worried mind. It became a physical, mental, and spiritual exercise for me.

Not even a half mile in, drops begin to fall from the sky. Big, fat drops. The kind that you can zigzag and dodge as they plop around you. I briefly consider turning around and going home, but push on. The weather forecast said the greater chance of rain was this afternoon. It was likely a passing cloud.

When a Woodmont group went to Guatemala in 2019, we visited a massive local cemetery on All Saints Day. In the early morning hours, the place was filled with people there to lay flowers at tombs, sing songs, and remember their loved ones who were no longer there. It was a reminder that life is short, that—as we hear on Ash Wednesday at the beginning of Lent—you and I are dust and to dust we will return.

As we tried to make our way out through crowded corridors, the morning son peaked over the mountain. And silly as it is, I thought about a scene from Avengers: Endgame. I totally knew it was coming and it still completely knocked the wind out of me.

At the end of the previous movie, an intergalactic villain known as Thanos wiped out half of the living beings in the universe. So the whole premise of Endgame was the remaining heroes desperately trying to find a way to bring back all of those lost lives. We knew that they would succeed. Spider-Man had been turned to dust, but he had a movie coming out later in the summer so we knew that he would somehow be resurrected.

I remember one summer when we were kids, my brother and I were bobbing in the ocean when he asked, “If God is outside of time and we are with God when we’re in heaven, then couldn’t we be watching ourselves right now?” That broke my brain a little bit. Periodic reminder that my little brother and sister are consistently brilliant people.

I don’t know what I believe about God and time nor do I want to suggest that was the endocarp to my brother’s theology on the subject, but that memory popped into my head today. I have been thinking a lot today about how we assign names and numbers to make sense of the ever-flowing stream of time. The months, days, and years that we have placed on time in concert with the earth’s rhythms are why I am 37 years old instead of eighteen and a half or 148. Today is Wednesday, but someone at some point could have just as easily decided that this day would be called Ralph.

All of that sounds very much like some zoned out late night college dorm room conversation. Being 148 years old on this gray Ralph morning is not why time is on my mind. It’s because it is Holy Week. It is that moment in time when we mark out and remember the final week of Jesus’ earthly ministry: his triumphal entry, his sharing in a last supper, his crucifixion, and resurrection. It is during this time of looking back and forward and within that time becomes a bit unmoored.

As I write this, I am sitting on the floor in the room of my childhood home. You are laying on a mattress intently reading a Scooby-Doo book as you wind down for bed. I close my eyes and think about when we first met you eight years ago. How you fit in our arms. How your face was round and squished up. Today you seem impossibly big and impossibly old, but I think that is how all parents feel on their kid’s birthday.

We were walking in a park the other day with your grandparents and you did something that you have done on our many other walks in this pandemic year. You slipped your hand into mine and held it as we walked along. Your animated voice bouncing from one idea to another as your other hand waved and gesticulated in all directions.

I’m thankful each time it happens because I know moments like that probably aren’t long for this world. I hope and know that others will take its place; other gestures and moments that connect us as you grow up. But those times when you put your hand in mine grounds me. It calms me in a world that has been anything but calm. It’s a reminder that when everything is changing that you will always be my son, I will always be your dad, and there is a love that holds us together. Those reminders are a gift.

It’s NCAA Tournament time again. And that means that it is time for me to go down my annual rabbit hole in which I fill out a bracket based on the question, “Which team’s mascot would win in a one-on-one fight?” After doing an Ultimate Bracket last year when there was no NCAA Tournament, I decided this year to film myself going through this year’s entries as I explain which mascot I believe should be crowned champion of Mascot Madness 2021.