Let’s start with this picture; a birthday tradition that began when you were probably five years old. You would always hold up the number of fingers you turned that day. Obviously last year, we exceeded the digits on your hands. You actually made a joke this morning about holding up one of your feet. Instead we just took this picture.

And this is the first time that I see something else in your birthday picture. I’ll look back and there is this bright eyed, cherubic kid. That’s still in there but I’m beginning to see the something beyond the kid now. You’re getting taller, leaner. You’re growing up and the little kid part of you is starting to recede into the background. I am not entirely sure what to do with that. I mean, you’re twelve. This is life. It is what happens.

We actually had a nice moment talking about this in the car on the way to school today. You crawled into the front seat after we dropped your brother off. “You can’t believe you have a twelve year old, huh?” you asked. I explained that I did believe it. I have been here the whole time after all, but it was strange. I remember first hearing your heartbeat. I remember the first time I saw your tiny, helpless body as the nurses handed you to your mom. So for that baby to be sitting in the front seat asking that question in a deeper voice as I drive him into middle school is weird. But I said that growing up is what you are supposed to do and your supposed to do and that your mom and I are proud of the young man you’re becoming.

I write this at the end of full day which has come at the end of a long week. It was Spring Break this past week and so your Mom and I thought it good to take you and your brother to Washington, D.C. Some of it was wonderful. I will never get tired of seeing you or your brother experience new things in this world. I swelled with pride as you started rattling off facts about a president and impressed a stranger when we were in the National Museum of American History. And I loved following you as you bounded around pointing out planes and spaceships at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the Air and Space Museum. Of course other parts, were a little more taxing. I think most parents have moments on vacation with their kids when they seriously question the whole concept of vacation with kids.

We capped it off by stopping in Pigeon Forge on the way home to go to Dollywood with your South Carolina grandparents and some of your cousins. All of this was a lot of fun, but I am incredibly tired and I am not sure that my weary mind can produce what I really want to in this annual letter to you. But I’m going to try.

I could rattle off how you still love ducks and Scooby-Doo. Or about how you are really in to reading books about which animals would win in a battle or real-life survival stories. I could talk about how if there is a wall then you are going to try walk on it. Or about how it slightly concerns me how half the time that you play Zelda, you are seeking out creative ways for Link to get maimed and/or killed. Or I could talk about how almost once a week while we are reading Bible stories, you ask really probing and challenging questions about faith that give my Master of Divinity degree a run for its money.

I always feel a little weird about Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It is not because I don’t think we should celebrate the late civil rights icon. We absolutely should celebrate his work and the work of so many others. His passion for justice, his commitment to nonviolent resistance, and the light of his theological imagination should be guides for us even today.

I still remember reading his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” for the first time. It was like he had unlocked something I had not yet understood about the link between the Christian faith and justice. And about how the silence of white churches was as complicit in racial inequality as those who defended Jim Crow with billy club, burning cross, and unjust law.

What makes me feel weird on this day is the way in which his words and legacy are boiled down to little inspirational aphorisms. Everyone does it. Many who make these posts do it with sincerity. Yet there are many corporations and politicians that do it because that is what you are supposed to do. We slap his picture and a quote about choosing love or doing the right thing and it makes you for a moment seem righteous.

My Granddad came to pick me up one day after school when my parents were out of town. I was probably 13 or 14 years old. I had a CD player in the front room with me and being a very earnest mid-90s evangelical who wanted to be seen as mature, I was listening to Caedmon’s Call. You don’t need to know who they were just that the song that was playing when my Granddad came in the house had the refrain “This world has nothing for me / And this world has everything / All that I could want / And nothing that I need.”

As we got in the car, Granddad asked what I was listening to and I began philosophizing about the song. In my best attempt at profundity, I explained that our minds as Christians are supposed to be solely on heaven and when our gaze is on the eternal then we realize that this world indeed has nothing for us. He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. In a very humble, straightforward way that likely had been with him since his farming days in Florida, Granddad simply said, “Well, there are loved ones.” After a moment of silence I mumbled, “Oh…yeah…you’re right.”

That conversation is never far from my mind. It is a core memory for me. Granddad believed fervently in following God in all that he did. My dad told me during a recent stint in the hospital that Granddad, while in great pain, would be praying and thanking God for the doctors, the nurses, and his children. Yet he never believed this world had nothing for him. Granddad demonstrated throughout his life that one of the main ways you love God is by loving the people around you.

I keep catching myself with a stupid grin on my face this morning. The Atlanta Braves won the World Series. This was not supposed to happen.

They never sniffed a winning record until August 6. One of their star pitchers never saw the mound all season due to injuries. Their best player who was in the midst of a MVP-caliber year was lost in July. Their general manager overhauled a decimated outfield at the trade deadline when other teams, teams with better records were selling out to wait for next year.

They ground it out, hung around in a weak division, started to string together wins, and found their way to NL East pennant in the last week of the season. That was supposed to be it. At 88 wins, there were teams that missed the playoffs with better records than Atlanta.

So no one really expected anything out of this team in the postseason. Few predicted they would make it out of the first round against Milwaukee. Not to mention they were Atlanta team and Atlanta teams have become known across sports for their ignominious playoff failures. Every time the Braves lost, sportswriters and fans knew that the other shoe was dropping.

Except every time Atlanta lost, they came out the next game and won.

So here’s the thing that you need to understand about being an elementary school kid in the late 80s/early 90s: we were led to believe that drugs were going to be constantly pushed on us. Our teachers told us this. Nancy Reagan told us this. TV shows told us this. Cartoon characters told us this a lot.

I still remember the PSA starring the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles where they showed a video of a kid named Tommy being offered weed. Donatello and company talked us through how to say no. That’s where I learned that “I’m not a chicken! You’re a turkey!” was going to be the kiss-off line that would save me from some mullet-headed, jean jacket-wearing fifth grade drug kingpin.

This is not to make light of drug addiction nor to gloss over the complicated legacy of the War on Drugs, both of which are serious issues. It’s just that I was told that I was going to need all this drug-resistance education because I would one day be bombarded with every illegal substance known to humanity. Except it never happened.

Until today.