Being at something long enough changes the questions we ask. Isn’t it?
Hello everyone.
After experiencing a feeling for the first time in my adult life, I began thinking about so many things all at once that I didn’t think through the majority of them with enough exploration, except this one: “I wonder what day 41 was like. I even wonder what day 1 after the 40 years was like.”
At the beginning of something, you may ask whether it will work. Somewhere in the middle, you ask whether you can keep going. But stay with something for long enough and, every now and then, you look up from all the doing and realise that you are no longer where you started. And sometimes you may even realise you are no longer on the right path. Not necessarily where you thought you would be either.
Just… somewhere.
This thinking coincides with the reality that we’re in the 41st week of 2026, and perhaps because forty carries so much weight in Scripture, I found myself thinking about what we usually do with it. Forty days. Forty nights. Forty years. We know what these numbers mean because we know what happened afterwards, and perhaps that is precisely why we sometimes read them too quickly.
We know some facts like
- Israel eventually entered the promised land, so the wilderness becomes the difficult bit before the victory.
- Moses came down the mountain carrying what God had given him, so the forty days become the preparation before the revelation.
But I have been wondering about the morning after. Or what year one after forty years in a wilderness was like? Imagine that for a moment without rushing to Jericho.
For some of the people who crossed the Jordan, the wilderness was not the interruption to their lives. It was their life. They had been born there. Their childhood memories were there. They had buried people there. They knew how to wake up in a wilderness, how to move in one, how to gather manna in one. Even their understanding of God’s provision had been formed there.
And then they arrived somewhere else. We are told almost quietly that once they ate from the produce of the land, the manna stopped.
I wonder what that morning felt like. The thing that had meant, God has provided for us today, was no longer lying on the ground. Not because God had stopped providing. Because they were no longer where they had been.
There is something in that which I find difficult to rush past. Sometimes we pray so earnestly to come out of a season that we do not consider that coming out of it may require another kind of faith. We become so accustomed to asking God for grace to survive something that, when He brings us through it, we may have to learn how to recognise that same grace in a different form.
And perhaps this is true of more of life than we realise.
- You spend years learning how to endure, and then one day you need to learn how to rest.
- You become excellent at starting over, and eventually you need to learn how to remain.
- You learn to live with very little, then have to discover who you are when there is enough.
- You pray for the door to open, but nobody tells you that walking through it means the old room can no longer organise your life.
Even arrival can disorient you.
And… maybe… that is partly why I have also been thinking about Moses coming down from the mountain. Forty days and forty nights in the presence of God sounds glorious when we tell it from this side of history. But can you imagine for ma moment that you are Moses – you’ve spent 40 days with the Creator of Heaven and Earth Himself; you have SO much to share with your fellow man; and before you even get home, on your descent, you immediately land in the noise, confusion and betrayal of a golden calf that mocks the very God you were with for all those days!
Imagine the contrast.
I just wanted to create that imagery before sharing these thoughts:
There are moments with God that do not deliver us into lives that are suddenly easier. They deliver us back into the same human world but the difference is that we/you are carrying something different. It’s the exact same world – all that’s different about it is you.
I am thinking perhaps that’s what formation, grace and glory actually look like more often than we admit. It doesn’t escape ordinary life, but returning to it changed.
Which brings me back to these forty weeks.
I do not think forty weeks means we have arrived in any grand sense. Especially because I am increasingly suspicious of the kind of arrival that requires us to pretend there is nowhere left to go. But because this is not my first rodeo, I am learning to better recognise changes in environments (spiritual, physical and otherwise) particularly when we have been at something long enough that we can see that we’re arriving somewhere; and I think there is grace in noticing where somewhere is. For instance:
- Some prayers feel different now.
- Some things that felt impossible in January have become ordinary.
- Some things we were certain about have had to die.
- Some disciplines that once required enormous effort have quietly become part of how we live.
There are things God has answered, things He has not, and things I suspect He answered by changing the person who was asking. Right? Because we can spend so much time measuring a journey by what changed around us that we can miss what changed within us. For example:
- Israel did not simply leave Egypt and enter Canaan. No. A people had to be formed between the two.
- Moses did not merely climb a mountain and return with tablets. No. He came down carrying something he did not carry when he went up.
And perhaps this is what staying does when we allow God into it. Time does not only move us forward. But when we practice faithfulness, it begins to work on the person doing the moving.
So this week I am less interested in asking, Have we made it? To start with, it was never the question. But I’m more interested in us, this week, asking the quieter question…
Who has all this staying made us? It has been 40 weeks – who has 2026 made us?
- Who are you now because of what you have had to carry this year?
- What no longer frightens you in the way it once did?
- What appetite has gone quiet?
- What prayer has become simpler?
- What have you stopped needing to prove?
- What have you learned to do without applause?
- What manna are you still looking for on the ground simply because that is how God provided yesterday?
Maybe forty is worth celebrating not because forty itself is holy, and not because endurance deserves a medal. Maybe it is worth noticing because every now and then we should turn around and see what grace has been doing while we were busy trying to get through the week.
We have been at it long enough to arrive somewhere. And perhaps the reverent thing now is not to rush toward whatever comes next. Perhaps it is to look around. To notice what is no longer here. To notice what is. And to ask God for the wisdom to become faithful in this place too.
I love you and I want you to know that God loves you. I also pray that the triune God blesses and heals you, your loved ones, the body of Christ and our world to the glory of our Father in heaven.
And whatever you do today, may it be pleasing to God.
One, Perfect Love.