13 JULY 2007
In November of last year, I hit one of those milestones that most men dread. As my wife, who is much younger than I am, reminded me I was approaching forty. It doesn’t really seem real, and certainly doesn’t feel like I’ve turned forty. I guess in my mind, like most men, I will always be that eighteen year old guy with a mullet and parachute pants, wearing a sleeveless British flag shirt and trying to play pick-up basketball. But here I find myself, in 2007, as a man approaching my forty-first year.
The reason I am blogging about this is because I may be the most idiosyncratic person on the planet. The most difficult transition for me was not turning forty. As a matter of fact, as you’ll see at the end of this blog, turning forty for me was quite easy. The hardest one for me was turning thirty. I became a Christian in my late teens, and so I spent all of my twenties in the learning years. In 1996, when I hit thirty, I had completed an entire decade in the ministry, and that was probably the most difficult thing. I couldn’t imagine that I was becoming one of those guys who would talk about his ministry in terms of “well, you were too young to remember this.” When I turned thirty, I had students who had been in my youth group back in 1984-85 who were now in the ministry. And so I was experiencing the generational shift.
Turning forty for me actually is anti-climactic. If you ever read that I’ve died, and wonder, “Oh my goodness, he died so young!” please erase that thought from your mind; because I find myself at the age of forty with all of my greatest dreams realized. When I was a twenty-year old preacher boy, I always said I wanted to write books, and I wanted to teach and reach other people with my writing and my teaching. At forty, because of the graciousness of Dr. Jerry Falwell, and the long-suffering of the Liberty University students, I find myself in that exact position.
I’ve written books that have sold quite well, and I continue to write. And every day I get to get up and do exactly what I’ve always dreamed of doing. Being a seminary president is fascinating to me because I don’t know exactly what that means and what it entails, I’ve only been doing it for three years. But teaching is my passion. Standing in front of a classroom and trying to impart passion and logic and reason, incorporating pathos, ethos, and logos simultaneously is my dream. I’ve often been asked, “what’s your next step?”
My next step is to continue doing this job as long as they’ll let me. I want to do this when I’m eighty. As long as I can continue to teach, as long as I can continue to be in the classroom, and as long as I can continue to write, that’s my driving force. So turning forty, for me, was no big deal; because when I turned forty I was doing exactly what I always dreamed of doing. The hardest things for me were climbing the mountain. Now I just enjoy the view, and I’ll work hard to continue to learn.
I don’t know what I’ll write when I turn fifty. But I do know this. If it’s as much as being forty, God always gives us our best ride during the last half our ministry.
