Twenty-ten is the year of the census. We’ve all received survey forms, and our government’s goal is to count every citizen. It’s nice to know we count, at least once every ten years.

At the beginning of our lives we all count, too. As our parents announced our names, they were recorded on a document even more official than a census form. Our birth certificates follow us through life, and we often find ourselves needing to pull them from the file cabinet to prove who we are.

I remember needing our firstborn’s birth certificate to register him for kindergarten in a public school. As it turned out, we used a Christian school instead, but had he gone to the public kindergarten, legal proof of age was essential. When you’re five years old, your birth certificate is the only official thing you’ve got.

We use birth certificates when it’s time to get a social security card, a driver’s permit, a driver’s license or an official ID card. They’re required again when applying for passports and also to get a marriage license, assuring the bride and groom are of legal marrying age. Birth certificates vouch for us in name, age, parentage and citizenship, awarding us all the rights in each of those categories.

At the end of our lives we each get another important document, a death certificate. This, too, becomes official and of permanent importance, the original filed with the state in which a person dies. I remember my deep sadness in sitting with the Hospice nurse who came to our Michigan home the evening Nate died, to fill out his death certificate. She made the official pronouncement that his life had ended and signed the paper.

As with a birth, a death is documented carefully but includes far more information than a birth certificate. In addition to name, address, date and time, it includes social security number, ancestry, military record, race, education, occupation, where the person died, who was present, whether or not a doctor was there, the reason for the death, what happened to the body and other facts.

If someone dies at home without Hospice care, the police arrive in squad cars. They bring detectives who legally must question the sorrowful spouse to learn if there was wrong-doing in the death, adding incredible strain to an already distressing situation. The body is taken away in a body bag by a coroner rather than on a stretcher by a representative of a funeral home, but this is official death certificate procedure.

Birth and death certificates bookend the whole of life on earth. We all start at one document and end at the other.  Our little grandson Nicholas, born in the UK and receiving his birth certificate there, automatically became a British citizen, just as children born in the US automatically become American citizens. His parents worked hard, however, to also secure American citizenship for Nicholas, since Hans is still a citizen of the US. This privileged baby had a passport picture taken before he could even sit up and pose, but dual citizenship in the two most powerful nations on the globe is a valuable commodity.

I have dual citizenship, too, although not in two countries. Although I’m an American, I also have citizenship in heaven, secured and written on a document far more important than any manuscript on file in our 50 states. My name is written in what the Bible calls the Lamb’s Book of Life, God’s record of everyone who embraces Jesus as the only way to heaven.

Nate’s name is written in that book, too, which is the reason he’s happily living in paradise today. And although birth and death certificates are supremely important on this earth, when all is said and done, the Lamb’s Book of Life will trump them all.

Referring to God’s eternal city: “Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” (Revelation 21:27)

Although my siblings and I are three-fourths Swedish, Mom never let us forget about the other fourth, thanks to her Irish father. St. Patrick’s Day was important to her, and she whooped it up big when the time came. She never drank a drop of alcohol in her life, but her love for a hilarious good time sometimes made us wonder.

Mom and Dad were a classic case of opposites attracting, and Dad once told us that one of the reasons he married Mom was because he knew she would be “good for him.” He was a conservative, shy Swede who didn’t speak English when he started school and never got into the social whirl. Mom, on the other hand, was a social whirl.

I have to admire Dad. He took a chance on a 29 year old extrovert when he was a quiet 42 year old. There were a few fireworks along the way, but overall it worked out as he’d hoped. She drew him into the party scene (Christian parties, of course), and he pulled her toward… well… I guess he didn’t. But they made it to their 50^th anniversary appreciating each other’s differences.

Every March 17^th Dad put up with Green Hi-C punch instead of his morning orange juice and green scrambled eggs instead of his preferred hard boiled. Mint jelly on his toast wasn’t as good as grape, but because he loved his wife, he went along on her holiday ride.

As for Mom, she pulled out all the stops. The whole relation was invited for a green dinner, and we all arrived wearing the right color. Mom always assured us she was “decorated to the skin,” which meant she was wearing her green underwear. Her exterior was adorned with buttons referencing her Irish heritage, and the meal was so colorful, it cast a green glow throughout the room.

Making a trip to downtown Chicago to see the river dyed green and the parade down State St. was good for starters, but her real love was playing games at home with her 17 grandchildren, the perfect number of kids for March 17th. She also passed out St. Pat’s Day cards to all of us with a $2 bill in each one, “a little something green.” (After she died, we found a stack of them in her dresser drawer.)

Mom was quick to say, “I know I’m only half Irish, but I lost all my Swedish blood in nose bleeds as a child.” She did indeed  seem to be Irish through and through, able to talk with a perfect brogue and tell a joke without botching the punch line.

So what’s the point of all of this? We’ve all heard the expression, “A mother is the hub of the home.” And another favorite, “If Mom ain’t happy, no one’s happy.”  In recent years being a mom with a keen interest in putting family first has come upon hard times. But if “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world,” what’s not to love about that powerful position?

One of the most important jobs every mother has is to show her family that being together is a good time, rich with blessing. In recent months I’ve experienced unnumbered blessings and endless help from my immediate and extended family members coming together for my benefit, young and old alike. Part of the reason is that Mom worked steadily to foster camaraderie and harmony within her family, beginning many decades ago. When she created holiday traditions, no matter how goofy, she was accomplishing her goal:  “Make it so much fun at home, they’ll want to be together there.”

”If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” (1 Timothy 5:8)

When Nate and I met, I was 5’ 5” and weighed 187 pounds, too much for me. But I was a college senior in charge of my own menu for the first time,  happily living on the “Three C’s” (Cake, Cookies and Candy).

There was only one problem. I was picking up weight like a snowman being rolled on a good packing day. Nothing fit right, and I felt like an inflated balloon.

It was the sixties, and a brand new dieting idea had just arrived: Metrecal, a flavored liquid touted as “a meal in a can.” A little bit of will power and lots of Metrecal, and they said the weight would fall away like fur off a shedding dog. So several friends and I suffered through multiple cans of Metrecal every day while studying and attending classes, then spent our evenings rewarding our self-control by driving the neon lights: McDonalds, Mister Donut, 31 Flavors and Burger King.

Then I met Nate, and as fate would have it, he liked chubby! Although Twiggy was the reed-thin beauty standard of the day, Nate was more of a Rembrandt man. He believed women should be soft and round, everything the late sixties world said was unattractive. I was a blessed woman, probably the only bride in the country who didn’t go on a diet before her wedding.

Throughout our marriage Nate held true to his position. Because I moved through seven pregnancies, I was fat a great deal of the time. He liked that. When I’d work hard to slim down afterwards he’d say, “Aren’t you getting too thin? Why don’t you put on a few pounds?”

What’s the proper attitude toward weight gain and loss? After a lifetime of yo-yo dieting, I can honestly say the only wise goal is to eat healthy. For me that doesn’t taste as good as the Three C’s. The fact that “healthy” is always the right choice is pretty hard to swallow.

Last week I went to the doctor for an annual physical. After listening to a reprimand (“You’re 14 years late on your colonoscopy”), I successfully opted out of an EKG and several other routine tests but agreed to a blood draw for a general health panel. Friday the doctor called with results. Everything was fine except my cholesterol count, much too high.

“This could get serious,” he warned. “Plaque causes strokes or heart attacks.” He quizzed me about any changes I’d made in my eating habits over the last two years, since my count had been good back then. I couldn’t think of a thing.

Then it hit me: rice cakes and peanut butter. In the last two years I’ve become an addict, enjoying four or five of them for every breakfast, occasional lunches and sporadic dinners. There’s nothing wrong with rice cakes. Its the multiple tablespoons of PB that have done me in.

So here I am, once again faced with that biblical principle of doing the right dietary thing. “Three months,” the doctor said. “Drop ten points each month, and we’ll re-test you in June. If you’re not down by 30, it’s medicine for you.”

So today’s been rough. Breaking a bad habit isn’t easy. What do they say… six weeks? Ouch. But our girls made a good point over the weekend. “Mom, if something happened to you so soon after Papa, that would be really bad.”

And of course they’re right. They did their part to help me get started by carting off the two giant jars of Jif I’d just purchased. I do want to act wisely and eat healthy, and I’m determined to drop 30 cholesterol points by June. More importantly, I want to live according to scriptural principles, in this case, moderation.

”If you find honey, eat just enough— too much of it, and you will vomit.” (Proverbs 25:16)

(Would honey on a rice cake be bad for cholesterol?)