It’s February 29, a day that only comes around every four years. If you were born on this day, this is the year you get to celebrate on your actual birth day. I have to separate “birthday” into two words for emphasis there even though my computer speller desperately wants me to put them together. This isn’t just your birthday; it’s the day in our calendar that corresponds to the actual date you were born.

This tells us that our calendar is just a manmade form of measurement; it’s not the actual thing. The actual thing is that our world is flying around our sun at a rate that is slower than we can measure evenly in days, months and years. Our measurements don’t equal the way things actually are so we have to make adjustments or we’d be getting ahead of ourselves. There are not 365 days in a year; there are actually 365 ¼ days in a year, so we have to add a day every four years to adjust for this, making this a 366-day year. I also remember reading about one additional adjustment needed every hundred years or so to make this all come out right.

The discrepancy is only in the measurement. This deserves some reflection, because I think there are lots of things we artificially (and in some cases inaccurately) measure that we would be better off just experiencing.

If you lived in a place or time that wasn’t advanced to the point of measuring its days and years, you would take life a day at a time. It wouldn’t even be Wednesday or Thursday, it would just be another day. Think a little about living this way, because there is something about this that is truer than our measurements. This is Wednesday, and we have lots of things we are doing that are associated with the fact that it is Wednesday. It’s a work day; it’s laundry day; in some circles it is still prayer meeting day; it’s the day you go to dance class, or yoga, or it’s the day you call up our teleconference Bible study (I hope you do!); but at the same time, it’s just a day – a day to do all the things we were meant to do – a day to realize why we were put on this earth – a day to open your heart to live, love and celebrate.

What really matters are the people who touch our lives and whose lives we touch every moment of every day. There’s no way to measure that or make it special; it just is. Think about making this a day we don’t measure what is: we live it. Happy Leap Day!