40th Birthday

Tomorrow I turn 40. This can’t be possible. Where did my 20’s go? My 30’s?

Forty seems like an age when it all should come together. Finances should be secure; career should be booming; leadership should be exercised widely and sagely. At forty, a man should be a paragon, a master tactitian, a rock, a sterling example. Younger foes should quail before a forty-year-old warrior’s hard-won skill; older foes should flee before his authoritative courage and still-unbowed strength.

The real forty year old steers his horse confidently over the mountain pass, lights up another smoke, and picks a bright-eyed path into the deep, lush meadows in the next valley. The real forty year old doesn’t stumble past thirty nine like a drunken teenager. He isn’t licking thirty-nine years of unhealed wounds. His pockets are lined with silk, not lint. He owns a tuxedo that still fits. None of his dress shirts have shrunk; he still enjoys wearing fine ties; he is crisp and snappy, not seedy. He has realized his youthful goals and now plans greater, bolder adventures. He does not pine or long or wish or what-if or doubt. He knows.

So I am not really turning forty. Really, I’m still fifteen. Fifteen, afraid-yet-ambitious, cocky-yet-uncertain, focused-yet-scattered, whole-yet-shattered. But fifteen and loved and secure in love. Loved by wife, by children. Laughing out loud with the “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh,” jumping and dancing with three little lives, our inheritance. And yes, loved in Christ, by the immanent-yet-hidden God, revealed logos, awesome Father, mysterious pneumos. Surrounded by ineffable love.

Not really fifteen then, and not really forty. Something else, undefined by calendrical time.