Follow @CrossroadsOz

Spending my Birthday and Christmas on Crossroads

Each year, I have one week where I have it good, as my birthday falls just six days before Christmas.  This year, I spent that week on Crossroads. Despite my best efforts to hide the date from my team, someone did eventually work out it was my birthday and blurted it out while we were having an audience with a group of cloistered Carmelite nuns in Lismore. The entire gathering then proceeded to sing me happy birthday, I think it’s safe to say that it will be one of the  holiest happy birthdays I will ever have sung to me.  That night I was (semi) surprised with a mud cake which we proceeded to eat directly from it’s plate without bothering to serve it out. This may seem a little weird to some but I’m sure anyone who has done Crossroads before can relate. In all seriousness though, I was blessed to spend my 22nd birthday with such wonderful people. Everyone went out of their way to make my day special and I don’t think I will ever have such a Pro-life birthday ever again.

Spending my birthday on Crossroads was a great opportunity to reflect on what we are actually doing this walk for. I was on the phone to a friend and as a passing comment I mentioned I felt lucky that it was my birthday. He responded by saying that that was dumb because everyone has a birthday. To which I simply said “no they don’t.” The truth is Birthdays are something we take for granted, we just assume that everyone has one but the reality is that millions of babies are killed every year before they are able to celebrate their first. We are walking so that every child  has the chance to be born and has the opportunity to blow out candles once a year.

Christmas on Crossroads was also a joyful experience but I will leave the details to my teammate Chris who has blogged extensively about our day just above this post. What I will say is that missing Christmas with your family is a great way to find out how much you actually love them. You don’t realize just how important your family are to you until you aren’t with them. My missing Christmas this year is a sacrifice both I and my family were willing to make in order to help spread the message of life and while it hasn’t been easy, it seems insignificant when you realize that many babies will never get to spend christmas with families.

God Bless

James