Two Graduations and a Wedding

And the Jubilee of 50

I am writing this letter to you from a desk in the master bedroom where I’ve moved my large computer monitor and a stack of books. There is a generous window and a tall magnolia growing just beyond it, and the window affords a decent view except for a standing debris pile from a nearly finished exterior project. There are cast-off PVC pipes, large sheets of cardboard, a rusty pool ladder dating from the 1940s.

In search of seclusion, I’ve closed the door to the master bedroom, then not two minutes later, heard the front door slam. I hear Ryan tell our boys, home from morning exams, that I am working. Seconds later, Colin bursts through the door and flops on the bed. “What’s for lunch?”

Normally, I work at a desk in the living room, and when our youngest boys are at school, it’s a decent arrangement. There are ample bookshelves, and there is ample desk space, though the desk space tends to get overcrowded with more stacks of books. The living room is brightly lit, which compensates for having to face a wall. But I know that summer is coming—and with it, all manner of interruptions—and this is why I have decided to move my workspace upstairs. I have been struggling to get consistent time to work, and I am hoping a little more seclusion will help, even if there are two college graduations and a wedding in the next four weeks, which isn’t even to mention that both Ryan and I have turned fifty in recent weeks.

What do you do when life is full to bursting with celebratory occasions? This is a busyness I can’t complain about, even if I still find it a bit disorienting.

Months ago, I tried to book a favorite local band to play at our house for a bang-up 50^th birthday bash. I suppose it was a divine mercy they were not able to accommodate me this month, much less this year. “Let’s look into 2025,” was the suggestion. I realized then that we would not, could not be the family to pull off two college graduations, a wedding, AND an outdoor birthday party complete with band and food truck. I was foolish to even consider it.

It reminds me of one of the examen questions I know to ask myself when my head swells with all kinds of creative ideas, not a single one threatened by any logistical challenge or operational difficulty: “How can you downsize this idea?” I’ve mostly taught myself to ask this on the front end of projects now, rather than resenting on the back end that I have overcommitted myself (and others) to something I can no longer revise or back out of. I confess that I did not ask the question early enough here, though once I had the firm no from the band, a revision was forced.

With so many celebratory occasions, it’s hard to find the attention, much less the time to name what’s happening. What to say about a birthday so big, so seemingly momentous? I think my oldest daughter said it best when she chose to read me a Scripture from Leviticus 25, which outlines the principle of the Jubilee year in Ancient Israel:

“You shall count seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the time of the seven weeks of years shall give you forty-nine years. Then you shall sound the loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month . . . And you shall consecrate the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. . . That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; in it you shall neither sow or reap what grows of itself nor gather the grapes from the undressed vines. For it is a jubilee. It shall be holy to you. You may eat the produce of the field,” Leviticus 25:8-12

Jubilee, in Ancient Israel, was a once-a-lifetime, every 50 years-practice of economic justice. Debts were forgiven, family lands were restored. “No selling, no repaying, no gathering,” as the Bible Project describes. If I call my fiftieth year a kind of Jubilee, I don’t want to take away from the radical redistribution meant to take place during Jubilee. Instead, I simply want to suggest that this might be for us a year of grace. Like the Jubilee, it might be a year where the past doesn’t determine the future. It’s a year when hope is restored. In a Jubilee year, what you harvest is not what you planted; what you eat is not what you’ve sown. All of creation takes a rest, farmers and fields alike, and yet good things still fall from the sky.

It's an apt way to describe how I’m feeling at the end of a half-century, on the eve of launching two adults into the world (and one into a marriage). I haven’t had as much time to reflect on the milestone as much as I might have liked, but I can say there have been prayers visibly answered; there have been relationships meaningfully repaired; there is good fruit born of long parenting years where Ryan and I prayed and tried and failed and prayed again. If you had asked me at discrete points along the way, I wouldn’t have sounded hopeful. But here we are, at Jubilee, when there is a pause in planting and a call to eat the fruit of the years, and I can see the good God has consistently done. I can see the time it’s taken—and the cooperation and repentance and patience and prayer.

At 50, I can celebrate, give thanks, even if I am postponing the band.