Seventy years ago, I was so young that my Mum received my birthday cards and other birthday gifts on my behalf.  If all the birthday cards sent to me since then had been hoarded up, they would probably have filled suitcases by now.

Thirty years ago now, I began receiving Birthday Blessings via e-mail. Very slowly at first, the trickle of e-mail birthday greetings slowly began to grow.  At first, when our modems raced at the then phenomenal speed of 300 bits per second, these were text only greetings. By the end of the 1980s, the first picture greetings were being attached to greeting e-mails and, provided I had the matching software programs, I actually got to see those pictures on the (usually) monochrome screen of my computer.

As email greetings grew in volume, so “snail-mailed” physical Birthday cards began to decline.  It was a kind of inverse proportional relationship. But the increase in e-mailed greetings was not destined to keep growing forever.  This year I received zero e-mail greetings for my seventieth birthday. You see, e-mail is rapidly being replaced by newer technologies.

So this year I received several hundred greetings on Facebook originating in around fifty different countries and written in many languages, of which I can only fluently read less than a dozen.  Google Translate is a great boon these days! I received nearly a dozen through FB Messenger and a handful by iMessage, one through Apple Messenger and one by way of a telephone call.

But all is not lost!

This year I still received four actual, real, physical birthday cards: three through the mail and one handed to me in person.

Let’s look at the physical cards:

My last alcoholic drink was consumed on the evening of Thursday 3rd August 1967, when I was thoroughly drunk and a young colleague said to me, “Phil Smith, you are an alcoholic!” That night, the Twelve Steps I had read about finally made sense, I admitted that I was an alcoholic, and I decided to never have another alcoholic drink.

Mary had no way of knowing what had happened to me 49 years earlier, and I really appreciate the humour in her choice of card. My family, who all know about my past, had a great laugh when I showed them the card.

For some reason, I had not thought I would receive both a card and a gift from my church which is called MyChurch. Wendy and I went out for a coffee together to celebrate my birthday and spent a while together just having a face to face talk. We both decided we do not do this often enough and we intend to do this much more frequently in the future. It is far too easy for us to neglect each other and take each other for granted with the weak excuse that we have three adult children with disabilities to look after every day. If we take more time to enjoy each other, the Lord will enable us to more competently parent our kids.

It was great to receive a card from Karen and Mum. Karen had applied a motorbike theme as she carefully hand made this card. As everybody who gets to know me knows already, I thoroughly enjoy riding my rather elderly motorbike.  I really appreciate the time and thought that has been invested in this card. I am afraid that it is many years since I last sent a physical birthday card to any of my relatives or friends. I usually send a greeting electronically, if I remember, and I am sad to say that my memory is nowhere near as good as it was fifty or sixty years ago.

Misti must have spent hours making this card. Like Karen, she applied a motorbike theme to it. It is hard to see in the photos, but this card has a very three-dimensional attribute and I am quite sure I would have no idea at all how to achieve such a great work of art. I am blessed to have such an artistically competent family!

So, on Facebook, I have no idea how often I clicked on “Like” or how many times I answered the greetings I received. To all who sent greetings and didn’t receive an individual note of thanks, I apologise. On the other electronic media, I think I managed to answer them all.

But it is the real physical cards that have inspired me to sit down and think about the meaning of the cards. To really think. So now I thank those who took the time to send/give to me real, fair dinkum, birthday cards. Blessings back to all of you!