Today is my birthday, my thirtieth birthday, and I am SO blessed.

So thankful, so overwhelmed with gratitude for my life.

Nearly fifteen years ago I was diagnosed with liver disease, and I remember asking the doctor how long I would be healthy, how long I would be ok. He couldn’t answer. A few years? Maybe? Ten? He wasn’t sure my body would let me have children, not when it was so compromised. I remember fighting back the tears in his office, filled with so much uncertainty, reaching out for any type of tangible hope, but finding none.

At least none that was quantifiable.

Every bit of my future that others somehow just assume will happen was now a question mark.

Would I live? Would I ever have children?

Thirty was a great big number to me at that age of fifteen. I was so afraid I wouldn’t reach it. I was so afraid of so much.

That doctor? Over the years I spent seeing him in pediatrics he gave me a nickname:

Smiley.

I remember the tears I shed in his office, but what impressed him about me were my smiles. I remember grappling with medication induced depression, but others who knew me always remember, well, JOY.

How could I have projected such joy? Such joy that a doctor who delivered harrowing diagnosis and spoke words that seemed to rob me of my dreams and my life, would look at me and call me Smiley?

What I faced? It was not in any way as horrible as what many face. I have never faced cancer, only its preached possibility. I have never faced death, but it’s reality hung over my head like a tangible force. And somehow it seemed a bit inevitable, like I wasn’t meant to really live life.

You know the book Little Women? So many people identify with one of those sisters. I identified with Beth. Beth was good, but that was all she really was. And all she really did? Was die.

And so I clung, I clung hard, to my faith, to my God, and in that clinging I found joy.

Today I turn thirty, and in some ways it’s unexpected.

I turn thirty, and I’m breathing, I’m alive!

I’m alive, I have survived a pregnancy and birthed a daughter!

I have joy, and I have hope.

I didn’t know it at the time, but even back then I was operating under a promise of hope and life. I could only see death, but God was already bringing me life.

I still don’t know how long I have on this earth, I might live a normal life span, but there are no guarantees. But honestly? That simple fact is true for all of us. None of us are promised our next birthday, I simply have a stack of medical files that like to remind me of the fact.

Some, when they reach a milestone birthday like thirty, start feeling anxious over their lost youth. They hate every number that comes up as the years march on, a reminder that they have grown older.

I don’t understand them.[Tweet “Lets bring joy back to #birthdays! #Joy like when we were children. Joy that we are #alive!”]

What do you hear when you hear thirty? Or forty? Or Sixty? Time lost or time gained?

I think many people only hear time lost, and I don’t quite understand that. Yes, you are no longer twenty, no longer “young.” So? You have had thirty or forty or fifty years of LIFE! Isn’t that worth rejoicing?

Lets bring joy back to birthdays! Joy and wild exaltation like when we were children. Joy that we are alive!

And maybe then we can all learn to be smiley.

Because every day is full of the promise of joy.

Happy Birthday to Me!

Joy Aletheia Stevens