#159: On Turning 40
Let's get personal, briefly.
Last week was one of the wildest ones I’ve had in 2025. Yet last week also included my fortieth birthday. I go “contemplative” on everyone in this brief newsletter by just offering some thoughts I jotted down last Thursday and Friday.
The Last Day of My 30s
It must be an especially modern thing to spend any measure of time reflecting upon the last day of one’s 30s. I suppose for most of human civilization males didn’t make it into their 40s—certainly not much beyond it. So, for “40” to have come to have such a peculiar status sometime in the twentieth century—and persist a bit into the twenty-first—is assuredly not something one should spend too much time on.
And yet we do.
I came to marriage later than most of my peers. Likewise, I became a father many years after my closest friends did. This has had a distinct effect on how I’ve come to see both myself and the nature of life.
History tells us that most men married and fathered children long before they do today. Even the notion of marriage and fatherhood by one’s early-to-mid-twenties, common as it was in the mid-to-late twentieth century, is a bit of an aberration. Every major civilization I’m aware of would have seen most wed and bear offspring in something like the late teen years. If a man survived long enough to reach 40, he would have been a sage (and probably a grandfather).
Here we are in the Year of Our Lord 2025, and men like me feel all kinds of strange emotions about leaving their 30s. Some of our distant ancestors would have celebrated making it into their 40s. Us? We’re not so sure we’re able to face it!
Some of my ambivalence about this life moment is physical in nature. Shortly after turning 30 I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. In the last two years, I’ve had the poorest health of my life. Needless to say, I’m troubled by the prospect of entering my 40s while not enjoying the kind of health I would have otherwise expected.
Additionally, the modern world continues to hurtle toward all of us at break-neck speed. Keeping up with the cost of living is daunting. The global and even national political scene feels turbulent and unpredictable. The work of the church is notoriously challenging. And marriage and family are the greatest responsibilities I can imagine any soul having.
And tomorrow I will be 40. A new decade, I presume.
On the other hand, it’ll be just another day. I’ll wake up, eat my multigrain Cheerios, shower and dress, and head to the office to write a sermon.
If I can find the time, I’ll use some birthday coupons to get a haircut and a discounted lunch.
Then I’ll work some more.
If I can manage to tend to everything else by 2 or 3pm, I’ll head home a little early to relax. At 5pm, my family and I will join a small group of friends for a birthday supper. (Hopefully, my eyes won’t be bigger than my stomach.) We’ll eat some cake, then come home to bathe the kids and put them to bed. After relaxing for a bit and reading a few pages of a biography, I’ll go to bed.
That’s it. That will have been my day, my birthday. And that’ll all be okay with me.
I have a supportive church, a wonderful family, a comfortable home, decent health, and a small little audience of readers who take time on Mondays to read what I’m thinking about.
Forget “my forties.” Aren’t we all fortunate just to have today?
The First Day of my 40s
Today I began the “birthday festivities” by opening a package my mother had sent a day earlier. It was long, slender, and flat. I had no earthly idea what it could be.
Inside the package was a small bag of birthday ballons with the number 40 on them. (Was she trying to be funny?) My kids love balloons. I blew up about 3 or 4 of them and set them on the ottoman in the living room so when the kids woke up and walked in the room, they would see them.
The last sight I saw when leaving for work this morning was my kids playing with my birthday balloons. Too distracted to eat breakfast.
God is good, and so is life.
Last week’s newsletter featured an excerpt from a recent article on church membership and baptism which I published at fwbtheology.com. You can click on over there now to read the article in its entirety, if you’re so inclined.
Apparently, John Mark Comer is sort of the “it guy” right now in evangelicalism. Quite predictably, there’s a lot of good in the things he is teaching and writing, but there is also some imprecision, hyperbole, and what I am sure is unintentional ambiguity.
Wyatt Graham helps us think about some of this as exemplified in one of Comer's more recent books. If you’re a church leader, you probably have at least a few members who have stumbled upon (and are possibly devouring) his work. Don’t go on a witch hunt. Just be informed.
Eclectic and esoteric spirituality is not just a “keep Portland weird” thing, either. A massive study of the American religious landscape from Pew Research Center, released today, found that few 18- to 29-year-olds consider themselves religious. A majority—54 percent—never attend religious services of any kind, and another 21 percent say they only attend once or twice a year.
Most young adults, however, say that they are spiritual. More than 70 percent of people born between 2000 and 2006 believe there is something beyond the natural world, Pew’s survey found. Eighty-two percent believe people have souls, 76 percent believe in God or a universal spirit, and nearly 60 percent report feeling a supernatural presence several times a year or more.
Like their counterparts on the Woke Left, the Woke Right have accepted as fact that there's a conspiracy against people like them and that their only real hope is to lean into the identity grouping and advocate for collective power under that heading. It's a toxic approach.
Large language models do not “write.” They generate syntax. They do not think, feel, or experience anything. They are fundamentally incapable of judging truth, accuracy, or veracity. Any actions that look like the exercise of judgment are illusory….What I want to say about writing is that it is a fully embodied experience. When we do it, we are thinking and feeling. We are bringing our unique intelligences to the table and attempting to demonstrate them to the world, even when our intelligences don’t seem too intelligent. ChatGPT is the opposite, a literal averaging of intelligences, a featureless landscape of pattern-derived text. Why have we declared this a marvel when there’s an infinite supply of greater marvels all around us?
Winn Collier, A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson
Ross Douthat, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious
Cal Newport, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout
Last week included a visit to the Kansas City Convention Center to meet with the Steering Committee for the 2025 Free Will Baptist National Association. Meetings like this really get one excited about the privileges of being a part of the host-state for this wonderful event. Moreover, we get to host this with our brethren from the Kansas District Association. They’ve been a great bunch to work with so far.
Make plans now to join us in Kansas City this summer. It’s a great city, and it’s going to be a great Convention!
