A Reason to Celebrate!

Today, the sixteenth day of September in the two thousand and thirteenth year of our Lord, Meagan Plank1 turns 10,000 days old. Ten thousand days!! To celebrate this achievement, we presented her a custom CWE certificate surrounded by the fanfare of a paper chain, cap gun, and her own VIP wristband (left over from the VIP lounge at Masquerade). The merriment will be a three-day long affair, culminating with a waffle bar on Wednesday.

Meagan accepting her certificate of achievement. 

You might be thinking one or none of these two things: "When will be my own Tkday²?" or "Why should I celebrate this day?"

Luckily for us, the world wide web is sprinkled with 10k day enthusiasts and online calculators to help nail down your long awaited day. The day occurs about 4 months after you turn 27 years old, in a time of life when adulthood lingers and no other ironic milestones are happening.

As to the second question, perhaps I have already begun to answer it: It is a fun thing to celebrate when there is seemingly nothing noteworthy happening! Haven't you heard radio announcers say "Happy Monday!" on Monday mornings? Do you have friends3 that love to celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day by irritating everyone like the title says, or Kansas Day by reminding everyone of John Brown, or the entire month of November by avoiding razors?

Until the next 10k Day celebration, maybe we can become a people who are good at celebrating the seemingly nothing times.  In collecting all of the newsy updates for this fall's Zipline over the last couple weeks, I know lots of amazing things are happening in your lives.  Much is happening that is worthy of great feasting- weddings and new jobs.  Much is also happening that does not even seem worthy enough for an instagram.

We worship a god who is Lord of the feast, a God who changed water into wine as His first miracle, and in so doing gave those wedding-goers a foretaste of the eternal feast coming at the end of history. That day, Jesus may have been thinking about his own wedding feast. God speaks about this feast in Isaiah 25:6-8- "On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine- He will swallow up death forever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken." Talk about the grandest 10,000 Day celebrations!

Maybe right now there does not seem to be very many happy things to celebrate about. When Samwise Gamgee woke up to see Gandalf after being rescued from the fires of Mount Doom, he says,"Gandalf, I thought you were dead. But then I thought I was dead. Is everything sad going to come untrue?" Jesus has insured that our ending will be a day of great celebration, when all tears are wiped away, when everything sad is going to come untrue.4

For most of you, there is still at least another five years to plan your own 10k Day celebration5. Until then, lets keep celebrating the littles, in light of the lots that is to come. In the words of C. S. Lewis, "we are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendor which she fitfully reflects."6


-Molly


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¹She organizes all the retreats, camper paperwork, and a whole bunch of other stuff. She does everything.
²What all the hip people are calling it.

³And by friends I mean maybe you and me…

⁴Timothy Keller's, The Wedding Party, is where much these thoughts about the miracle in John 2 are sourced. 

⁵Mine is on a Saturday and everyone is invited and its going to have a ten thousand toothpicks construction contest, a 10k race, a flea market white elephant gift exchange, and a block party featuring a Dad Band.7 

⁶From The Weight of Glory. He gives good perspective about understanding the things that we think are really great in light of what they really reflect.

⁷Dad Band= band full of your friends' dads. Its all the rage.