On This Good and Not-So-Good Friday

27 years ago, I was born on Good Friday. I spent that Easter Sunday of 1987 in a blessed hospital, though the specifics are a bit fuzzy.

I haven’t celebrated a “true” Good Friday birthday since I was 5 years old, and I won’t celebrate another Good Friday birthday until I turn 84. This year, my mid-April birthday fell closer to Good Friday than it has in the last decade of Good Fridays.

Over the last 24 hours, removed from the ritualistic confines of “church” for the first time in a long time, I’ve been pondering the significance of this day. Wondering whether to blog about it.

Today on Good Friday, Christian bloggers around the world are blogging. They’re blogging about Jesus and sin and death and how the “Good” in Good Friday is both an understatement and an overstatement, the truth and a paradoxical lie, depending how hip and controversial they want to sound.

I could easily add to the Christianese noise today. I could praise Good Friday as the best, or I could rant about Good Friday as the worst. I could look back 2000 years and theorize how what happened on that fateful day was fair or unfair. A triumph or a horrific tragedy.

Instead of looking back 2000 years, though, I will simply look back 27.

27 years ago on Good Friday, I was born. Me. An innocent baby who would gradually turn into one messed up human. A human with undeniable roots in Good and yet equally groomed and, at times, utterly consumed in un-Good.

I don’t quite know what to make of this paradox; I simply wonder.

I wonder what happened. When exactly I lost my way.

I wonder if I’ve wasted my life. If the precious life I was granted 27 Good Fridays ago has not amounted to what it could or should have measured by now.

I wonder whether I can ever rediscover my innocence. Whether those precious childhood days of confidence and love and Good will ever flood my existence again.

I wonder if I’ll ever truly learn the meaning of grace and letting go. Of giving both myself and others a break.

Wonders and struggles aside, I suppose I am indeed grateful to be alive. Grateful to have risen and fallen and fallen so often and painfully, only to experience the hands of others, the hand of God holding mine. Pulling me up. Reminding me first of the Good in Him and, thus, the Good in me.

Today, I am grateful for Good Friday. For the Good and Not-So-Good of life and everything in between that some way, somehow, points back to Him.

Points back 2000 years to one Man dying on Good Friday so that another may live.