Turning 40: What I Didn’t Plan For, But What God Built Anyway

I turned 40 yesterday, and if you had asked me five years ago what that birthday would look like, I would have described a completely different life. A different house. A different last name, maybe. A different everything.

Instead, I spent my 40th the way I spend most of my days now — showing up. For my daughter. For my students. For a country club full of sunburned, chlorine-smelling campers who needed someone to referee both a kickball game and an emotional meltdown in the same ten minutes. And somewhere in the middle of all that showing up, I realized the life I actually have is better than the one I was planning for.

That’s not a sentence I could have written a couple years ago.

I don’t talk much here about the year everything I’d built fell apart. I’m not going to start now — some of it isn’t mine to tell publicly yet, and some of it is still moving through rooms I don’t get to control. But I can tell you this: I know what it is to plan a future in detail, down to the venue and the date, and watch God close that door completely. And I know what it is to stand in the wreckage of that and have to decide, all over again, who I was going to be.

Forty found me putting that decision into practice every single day. Here’s what actually held.

1. I Stopped Waiting for My Life to Start

For a long time I think I was quietly waiting — for the right season, the right relationship, the right circumstances — before I let myself feel settled. Forty broke that habit. I’m a single mom. I’m running a household by myself. And I stopped treating that as the holding pattern before “real life” and started treating it as real life. God didn’t ask me to wait for permission to be fully present in the one I’m actually living.

2. I Found Out Church Isn’t Just Where I Go, It’s Who I Am

Somewhere in the rebuilding, serving stopped being something I did on Sundays and became part of how I define myself. Whether it’s dinner church, handing a plate to whoever walks through the door, or just being present in that community week after week — it’s not an obligation anymore. It’s identity. I used to think faith was mostly private. Turns out mine grew the most in public, around a table, doing something small and repetitive with people who weren’t asking anything of me except to show up.

3. I Learned What It Means to Pour Into Kids Who Aren’t Mine

Between my classroom and camp, I spend more hours with other people’s children than most people do in a year. There’s something about teaching a fifteen-year-old how to balance a chemical equation, or watching an eight-year-old figure out how to serve a volleyball for the first time, that reminds me why I’m still doing this work. I’m not just filling a job description. I’m one of the adults these kids get to have in their corner. That felt heavier — and better — turning 40 than it ever has before.

4. I Quit Measuring My Life Against the One I Didn’t Get

This is the one that took the longest. Grief has a way of showing up at the exact moments you’re supposed to be celebrating, and birthdays are prime real estate for it. I had to consciously decide, more than once, that the life I’m living isn’t a consolation prize for the one that fell through. It’s just mine. It’s the one God is actually building with me, in real time, and it doesn’t need to be measured against a version of 40 that never existed outside of a plan on paper.

The Takeaway

I didn’t get the 40 I thought I’d have. I got a different one — messier in some ways, but a lot more honest. Single mom, full-time teacher, camp director, still figuring most of it out day by day. And somehow still blessed enough that I don’t have the words for it most mornings when I sit down with my coffee and my devotional.

If you’re staring down a milestone that looks nothing like what you planned, I’d just say this: let God build the version you didn’t ask for. Mine turned out to be one I actually wanted.