This year Elise is 10. I am an odd duck. I know this and am okay with this. But this year, I appear to be hung up on the number itself.
10 is a nice number. It is the base of all other numbers. It is a measure of completeness. It is an even number in which every portion of it has a match. It is how life is blocked off. In almost all areas. Money, culture, sports, stars, music, science, language, even in the Bible.
As a simple description, it is perfection. "She is a '10'!" When a baby is born, we refer to "10 fingers and 10 toes" as a measure that they are beyond what was expected and the parents are enchanted.
Not to down-play my other kids AT ALL, but Elise is my "10". She is a base in my world that adjusts everything else around her. This is not to say the world revolves around her, but she has altered my perception, my reality, the depth of the world around us. She has made me appreciate things I would have otherwise missed, in the day-to-day, in her siblings, in my family, in the spiritual world that swirls around us all. She has changed my awareness of the fragility of life. She has brought to consciousness the beauty of imperfection and the opportunities in it. She has allowed me to embrace the idea that not being enough, is a good thing, in that I rely more heavily on others and in God Himself, and it is an exhilarating thing. When you encourage God to fill in the holes of your deficiency, the good becomes exquisite. The transcendence of the spiritual world over my expectations fills me in ways that I did not even know to ask for...
We regularly ask God to "get us through things". We ask friends to pray us through dark times. We rarely ask God to transform our lives and perspectives. We never ask for enough. In the Bible, we are told to over and over. In the Bible, we are told that we MUST strive for more than we are. And we are rarely bold enough to ask for it.
Romans 8:37-39
"37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Can you not hear it? We are more than eeking through life. We are more even than conquerors! We are bound to God such that we CANNOT be broken from him.
Want to know something cool? Count the things that were listed that cannot separate us. It's 10. Yep. He used the base number, the measure of all things, to tell us that we are bigger than life. We are tied to eternity.
I have shared this bit of trivia before. But I read somewhere that the term "touched in the head" (defined as crazy or not all there) was based on the puritanical belief that the imperfect came as a protection. That those who were not whole had been touched by God without the "veil" drawn between...and the consequence was a barrier between them and everybody else. We could not comprehend God in all his glory and the intimacy would overwhelm us...so those who could and had, were kept separate from others by a disability...There are many days that I absolutely believe that! Elise sees God more purely than the rest of us....but maybe she was put here, just to help us see past the veil.
God has used Elise to break my expectations of life over and over again. She is my base 10. She reminds me daily that I am tied to eternity. She draws life past expectations. She draws life past boundaries. She has 10 fingers and 10 toes. She enchants me.
She is 10 today, and somehow this is her perfect number, because she is "10" in all the ways you can use it.
Happy Birthday, my sweet girl! Thank you for the perspective you brought with you. We would never have seen life for what it was without you.
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