Birthdays....

There's is amazing thing about birthdays they either make you sad or they make you really happy. Until I was about 23 birthdays were always hard for me – I never like them, and I usually cried when I had a birthday and I always associated them with something bad. Each year my birthday was a reminder that I was a year older and a year lonelier. I don't say this for pity. I don't want people to feel sorry for me in anyway – but for several years of my life I was sad. It's a hard thing to admit that I suffered from depression and anxiety and loneliness; and sometimes I think a lot of it was my own fault. I wasn't strong enough to see my own beauty, to see my own intelligence, to see how beautiful my life really was. And then I discovered a book – it wasn't that I wasn't a reader before because I was. In fact I was a self-taught reader, and I read alot. It didn't matter the topic, it didn't matter what was going on I always had a book to read. But it wasn't until I was 23 when I discovered Max Lucado's He Choose the Nails that I felt a real shift in my life.
I was raised a Christian. I always believed in the tenants of the Christian faith. But still I felt like Jesus was abstract. His sacrifice wasn't for me. I never felt that I completely belong to him but all that changed with one par his sacrifice wasn't for me. I never felt that I completely belong to him but all that changed with one book.
That one book shifted the way I thought about myself; it shifted the way I thought about my life and it definitely shifted the way I believed in the power of the written word. When I was a teenager Stephen King was the man that inspired me to write. But it was maxes work that inspired me to live. It inspired me to enjoy life more fully, to give more, to love more and to read more.
I feel now at 33 that books have shaped my life; I carry the work of Max Lucado, Rob Bell, Stephen King, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, J.K. Rowling and so many others in my heart. He Choose the Nails is just one example of how one book can change someones heart. Books have made me life whole; so much so that I want to create my own so that I can perhaps touch someone the way other authors have touched me. So....my birthday wish this year is to SAY YES to writing and to SAY YES to continuing to live my life with books in it. Here's to another fabulous year of writing, reading and loving.