As you read this I should be spending the first few hours of my fortieth birthday flying towards home. I hope to be with my family just before the kids all go to school and then have a BIG Birthday fry-up breakfast with my wife! What extra joy to be arriving home on the morning of such a day after a long trip, albeit to as glorious a place as South Africa!
This post was written before I even went away, and perhaps my thoughts will have developed further, but here are my thoughts on turning forty:
- Immense gratitude to God for his faithfulness to me thus far. I have been the recipient of much undeserved favor.
- An awareness that I might have already passed the half-way mark of my life, and if I haven’t I surely will relatively shortly, and hence a renewed desire to treasure every day that remains.
- Thankfulness for the friends and most of all the family that God has graciously given me. I am a loved man, and I am confident that the comments section below this post will rapidly fill with birthday wishes (it better!)
- Great hope for the future. As I officially leave the “Young Restless and Reformed” group, I wonder what group I move into. But I know that with greater age comes a greater responsibility to do my best to help those coming behind. May God make me an encouragement to many younger men and women, that they will accomplish more with their lives than I have with mine so far. Chief of those, may my children develop a strong personal relationship with Jesus that will keep them close to God throughout their lives and eternity. Pray for me today that I will be a better father and husband.
People say that life begins at forty, someone once told me that nobody listened to him before he turned this age. I trust that I will have useful things to say for people to listen to, and so ask God to fill my mouth and my keyboard in future with words that will be a blessing to others. May he take from me unhelpful, hurtful, vain words. May he give to me kind, engaging, insightful, prophetic words that will lead others to honor him.
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