This morning I woke up to over one hundred notifications on my phone from friends and family who paused for a moment to wish me happy birthday from all over the world. Oh, the wonders of technology. I spent the morning reading through them and pondering what this year would bring, but honestly, I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the number. Forty. Wow. Forty.
Every year, I pick out a theme for myself. Something that I wish to accomplish within my heart and mind, new behaviors to adopt, new thoughts I wish to entertain, new challenges that I am ready to take on. One year I decided it was my year to be uncensored, and that was highly entertaining for me at least. I am not so sure about my friends. Last year, I determined to be more honest with and about myself. That wasn’t much fun for anyone. This year life has been throwing me curve balls so I had not really stopped to think about what the theme for this milestone of life was going to be. So I spent the morning thinking about the oh-so-significant number that is forty.
The Bible talks a lot about the number forty. It was the length of time it rained in the great flood of Noah’s day. Forty was the number of years that the children of Israel wandered in the wilderness. For forty days Jonah prophesied to Nineveh about its impending judgement. Elijah spent forty days eating roadkill delivered by ravens when he fled from Jezebel. Moses spent forty years in Egypt and another forty in tending sheep before God spoke to him at the burning bush, and for forty days he remained on Mt. Sinai as he received the Torah. Forty was also the number of days that Jesus faced temptation before embarking on his earthly ministry.
Testing, trials, and temptation are all aspects of forty, but in the middle of all that fun stuff it is easy to overlook the positive aspects – at the end of forty, be it days, weeks, or years, that is when the good stuff starting happening. Sure the forty leading up to the good stuff was awful, but once it was over, that is when God really kicked things off. The rain stopped, they got to go into the promise land, Nineveh repented, Elijah got to go eat real food, Moses got to have a sit down with God, and Jesus emerged from the desert and shook the whole word up.
This doesn’t mean that everything became smooth sailing, not by a long shot. It meant that all the stuff that had happened before either equipped, empowered, or validated the right of these people to do the real work God had called them to do. Noah didn’t emerge the ark to sit on his rump. He had to rebuild civilization. The entry into the promise land meant full on war with the giants who lived there. Nineveh had to give up its evil ways and act on the words of the prophet. Jezebel didn’t evaporate while Elijah was hiding out, she was still there and he had to face her and her prophets again. Every time Moses got to talk to God, it wasn’t so he could sip some tea and share some gossip about the neighbors. He was being given the tools to build a nation out of a bunch of rag tag slaves who didn’t have a clue about how to become the people God declared them to be. And Jesus? His temptation is what allowed the writer of Hebrews to say what he did. Look it up yourself, and rejoice – Hebrews 4:15. But we all know that was just the beginning of what he would endure.
In Hebrew the number forty is represented by the letter mem. The mem denotes power, might, chaos, spirit, the womb, and water. Water because it is the first letter of the ma’yim the Hebrew word for water and the original pictograph that the Hebrew letter is based on is a three pointed wave. The connection the womb is found in the forty weeks of pregnancy, and the fact that the mem has two forms – open and closed, portraying that there is a season for enclosure and protection and a season to go out into the world when one has properly matured. In creation, we see the Spirit of God hovering over the waters and calling forth life from the deep or from the chaos the proceeded the manifestation of his will for this earth. Within the mem we see this overwhelming picture of change from chaos to order, from potential to being, from thought into action, all in the proper time and manner.
No matter how I turn this number around in my head, one thing keeps repeating. Forty is the beginning point. The place from which one emerges into the world mature enough and wise enough to take action, and to begin the process of actively working towards one’s God given calling. I wished there were room and time to permit all the ways that God has been pointing me to this idea over the past few months, and all the ways that I have been trying to escape it. So as I chose this year’s theme for my life, it isn’t based on some mystical interpretation of a number, but instead I am seeing confirmation of a direction he has in store for me. Time to emerge from the season of testing, trials, and temptation and move into a season of actively shaping the world I inhabit in accordance with all things I have learned thus far.
Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
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