For my 30th birthday, my hands broke out in festering sores and scabbed over so that I could barely touch anything. I also got a fever. I suppose I had imagined myself out skateboarding for my 30th birthday, a demonstration of my Peter Pan-like defiance of aging and the accompanying social expectations. I was able to go wakeboarding the weekend before my birthday. Wakeboarding is the latest adaption to waterskiing; the difference is that you stand sideways on a single board, so it's more like skateboarding or snowboarding, and you can do more tricks. It was my first time, and the only trick I could do was slap my face on the lake repeatedly and forcefully. So my neck was stiff for days. None of these ailments were conducive to an age-defiant attitude. I am glad that God reminded me that my life and times are entirely in his hands. I understand that there is no amount of willpower or positive thinking that can deliver me from every ailment, but there is a more insidious theology that creeps up from within my desperation for longevity and health, and that is the expectation that God will honor my attempts at what I regard as a full life by, I suppose, allowing me to persist in my activities. A danger is that I would begin to redefine a full life, and abundant life, by the fun I have rather than by the God I know. My meager physical inconveniences were reminders as to where my joy must come.