{"id":11016,"date":"2016-02-08T08:31:51","date_gmt":"2016-02-08T13:31:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dougbittinger.com\/thoughts\/?p=11016"},"modified":"2025-04-21T01:56:38","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T05:56:38","slug":"new-personal-best","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/new-personal-best\/","title":{"rendered":"New Personal Best"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"birthday\"This morning I celebrate a new personal best.\u00a0 It could be measured in a number of ways.\u00a0 Today marks 21,915 days (including leap year days) of life.\u00a0 Or I could say I’m celebrating 20 years of life — for the third time around.\u00a0 Or I could say I’ve broken into the realm of hexagenarians<\/a> (but if you repeat that, make sure it’s spelled correctly!)\u00a0 Or I could just come out and state that today I turn 60 years old.\u00a0 No, let me rephrase that: 60 years of age.\u00a0 You are only “old” when you give in to that mental image.<\/p>\n

I will say that I am surprised I’ve lived this long.\u00a0 I have not been particularly gentle on or cautious with my body and the joints and sinews do remind me of this carelessness.\u00a0 There have been a couple of times I wasn’t so sure my sojourn through this world wasn’t over.\u00a0 But God did not see fit to release me yet, so I stood up and walked on.\u00a0 In fact, today I am feeling better than I have in quite a while.\u00a0 To continue the analogy, there is a spring in my step.\u00a0 There are fewer pains to plague me, and I seem to have encountered a refreshing of the mind in the past week that has me once again humming and singing to myself, and to God, throughout the days.\u00a0 I credit that to the Holy Spirit, who is writhing around in me more than normal, holding out the promise of something good being about to happen.<\/p>\n

Normally I don’t look forward to birthdays.\u00a0 I don’t hide from them either, just try to brush them off as merely another day.\u00a0 But this one is sort of a milestone.\u00a0 A personal best similar to when 200,000 miles rolls up on the odometer and the wheels haven’t fallen off.\u00a0 There is a sense of accomplishment in it that fuels my desire to make it to the next milestone.\u00a0\u00a0 But today, I’ll take a few moments to relish this one and celebrate a little. Tomorrow I’ll set out on the trek toward 70.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning I celebrate a new personal best.  It could be measured in a number of ways.  Today marks 21,915 days (including leap year days) of life.  Or I could say I’m celebrating 20 years of life — for the third time around.  Or I could say I’ve broken into the realm of hexagenarians (but … Continue reading “New Personal Best”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-11016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-life-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11016"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20295,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11016\/revisions\/20295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}