It’s my birthday so naturally, I woke up at 3am not able to sleep 🫣 so I wrote this to honor my 42 years!

3am Birthday

I was born at 3 a.m., weighing only three pounds. Before I knew the word survival, my tiny body was already practicing it. Before I understood fear, abandonment, hunger, grief, or the ache of wondering where I belonged, I was fighting to stay. Maybe fighting was the first thing my body ever learned. That was my first birth. I entered this world in the darkness of morning, too small to understand how much darkness and morning would eventually come to mean to me.

For years, my birthday carried a strange tension. How do you celebrate being born when so much of your life has been spent surviving? I used to fear this day. Birthdays have a way of counting more than years. They count who came, who stayed, who left, what was lost, what should have been, and what never was. Sometimes a birthday doesn’t simply remind you that you were born. It reminds you of everything you have mourned.

Surviving has taught me, though, that joy really does come in the morning after the darkness of mourning. Not because grief disappears or because the story suddenly becomes tidy, but because eventually light finds its way into places you were certain would remain dark forever. Maybe morning has always been part of my story. After all, I came into this world at 3 a.m., somewhere between the darkness of night and the promise that morning was coming.

Somewhere along the way, I experienced a second birth. This one wasn’t into survival. It was into purpose.

My second birth came when I began to see the beauty in the mess of helping other people. The broken pieces of my own story stopped looking only like evidence of what happened to me and started becoming places where I could recognize the pain of someone else. I began noticing the child who needed someone to see them, the mother who needed someone to stay, the family who needed encouragement, the person who simply needed a chair pulled up to the table. Purpose didn’t arrive as one great revelation. It arrived as people.

Messy people. Hurting people. Beautiful people.

I started realizing that maybe I survived some things so I would recognize survival in somebody else’s eyes. Maybe I know the ache of not belonging so I can spend my life making room. Maybe I remember what it feels like to need one safe person so I will never underestimate the holy weight of being one. The mess I spent so much of my life trying to escape became the very place where I learned how to sit beside someone else in theirs.

That is the patchwork of my life. Some pieces were given to me. Some were taken from me. Some came from places I never should have had to survive. There are patches of hunger, leaving, loneliness and grief. There are also beautiful pieces stitched into my story by teachers, families, friends and strangers who noticed me when they didn’t have to. Somehow, God has refused to waste the fabric.

That doesn’t mean I believe every painful thing happened for a reason. I don’t need to make suffering beautiful in order to believe beauty can grow beside it. Pain doesn’t get the final word. Torn fabric can still become part of something meaningful. Scraps can still be gathered. The story can still be stitched.

My second birth has also taught me something my first one couldn’t, helping people does not require losing myself. I can protect people and protect my peace. Love can have boundaries. Compassion can say no. Rest does not make me weak, and peace does not make me selfish. I can leave the door open without allowing chaos to move into the house. I can love people deeply without believing I am responsible for saving their souls. I am not. Only Jesus can do that.

Maybe peace is one of the newest patches being sewn into me.

That three pound baby became very good at fighting. Hold on. Keep moving. Figure it out. Survive. Those instincts carried me through places I once thought might swallow me whole. But I am learning that I don’t have to keep fighting simply because fighting was the first thing I learned. There is a time to survive. There is a time to mourn. There is also a morning when you look around and realize, I am still here.

Today, I think about that tiny girl arriving at 3 a.m., three pounds and fighting for a life she knew absolutely nothing about yet. She didn’t know how many times her heart would break. She didn’t know how many people would eventually help stitch it back together. She didn’t know she would someday discover that the mess she desperately wanted to escape would teach her how to sit with people in theirs. She certainly didn’t know there would be a second birth, the moment survival began becoming purpose, mourning started making room for morning, and she realized she wasn’t only alive. She could help someone else live, too.

So today I don’t want to fear the day I was born. I want to honor her. The three pound baby who fought to breathe. The girl who kept going. The woman still becoming. The helper learning boundaries. The storyteller gathering scraps. The heart learning that protecting my peace isn’t the opposite of loving people; it is part of learning how to love them well.

Maybe birthdays aren’t merely about counting how many years we have lived. Maybe they are also about recognizing how many times we have been born. Once into breath. Again into purpose. Again into love. Again into peace. Again every time we discover beauty where we once saw only broken pieces.

I was born at 3 a.m. Maybe morning has always been part of my story.

After the darkness, morning came. After the fighting, purpose came. After the mourning, joy found me again.

I am still here. Still becoming. Still helping. Still protecting my peace. Still gathering the pieces. Still trusting the One who can see the pattern when all I can see are patches.

I was born today 42 years ago.

Maybe my second birth was realizing that I don’t have to understand the whole pattern to recognize the beauty in the patchwork.