I want to be a party person. This is what I’ve recently decided.

My mother is a party person. She knows how to celebrate with the best of them. She brings the instruments. She orders the things off Amazon. She makes the person at the center of the celebration feel chosen. She rallies hard for others because people deserve to be rallied for. And I’ve decided that this is a great goal, a worthy goal for my life: to be more of a party person with each passing year.

My first roommate in Atlanta was a party person too. She would transform our backyard into this mystical celebratory land. She would blow up the balloons, buy the cake, and the celebrate the guts of this life. What I admired most about her is that she had no problem planning parties for herself. She loved to celebrate things like birthdays because it gave her this chance to thank the people who’d played their role in transforming her and remaking her.

 

…

I’ve always been an unnecessarily fear-filled party planner. I’ve planned the parties, I’ve partaken in the celebrations, but I am always waiting for this doom-filled reality to show up that no one is coming to my party and no one wants to celebrate me. Where does that come from? Why are we so eager to pump ourselves full of fear?

Celebration is actually spiritual discipline. It is commanded and it is a well-loved tradition of the Bible. So I am determined to get over this “not worthy of celebration” feeling in my spirit before I hit 30 in a few months.

 

So I am craving your wisdom and want to use this comment section to have a dialogue. Pick a question below to answer in a comment:

How do you celebrate the good in your life?

How do you get past the fear of celebrating yourself?

What do you think of birthdays: yay or nay? Anything special you look forward to each year?

What’s a favorite tradition you think I should adopt?

How can you and I better celebrate in 2018?

Let’s talk!