This is one of my mom’s favorite stories to tell about raising me, and a testimony to her faith, and haShem’s faithfullness. I hope you enjoy it.
When I was young, about three or four, I kept bugging my mom what day my birthday was. I knew it was in the fall, but at that age, not much more. And I was too young to understand “September 29.” But that didn’t stop me from asking her, almost every day, from mid-August on.
One day, she grew flustered with being asked so many times and, without thinking, she told me, “You see that big, white birch tree in the middle of our back yard? The day the leaves fall off that tree, that’s your birthday.”
I ran off, satisfied, and apparently stopped bugging her. But immediately after she said it, she began to regret her hasty words. So she prayed, “God, please help me. Don’t make my son grow up thinking his mother is a liar.”
Well, September rolled on and the temperatures began to decline, and yet not one leaf fell from that white birch, right up through September 28, even though they grew a beautiful golden yellow.
The next day, the day of my birthday, my mom took me out into the back yard. We had some patio furniture set up back there and there was a lawn chair under that tree. She sat down in it and pulled me up on her lap, prepared to tell me it was my birthday.
Before she even began to speak, the leaves began to fall. And they didn’t just fall; they rained down on us, covering us in a golden blanket of white birch leaves.
Mom told me she prayed a prayer of thanks that day, and promised never again to speak so hastily; while she appreciated the answer to prayer, she was never one to put God to a foolish test.
Tags: birthday, Mom, patio furniture, white birch leaves