4.12

Today is April 12, or 4.12, a date that makes me smile. This date, and the numbers that make it up, are one of the biggest physical signs I have on this earth that God loves me.

I’ve thought a lot recently about sharing the goodness of God — to not just think about it, but to write it down, and to share it with others.

I’ve known for a while now that, no matter how dark or cruddy things are, and how much I struggle to repeat God’s promises to myself in any effective way, when I get a chance to talk to someone else, suddenly everything is clear. When talking about God to friends or people who are struggling, I find all this truth bubbling from inside of me that I didn’t know was there. I thought it had drifted away or died a slow, lonely death, but there it is, as strong as ever, making a defense for the goodness of God and His involvement in my life. When the sitting alone and groping for hope and trying to speak truth to yourself just leads to darkness, emptiness, or silence, sometimes the best thing to do is to find a friend and make a case for the Jesus you’re missing.

Knowing this, and having seen it happen a few times now, I’ve been thinking of other ways to do it. The Israelites set up monuments commemorating what God had done that they could look back to whenever doubt or shadows or confusion came into life. We need monuments, too, and for the same reason that talking to a friend about God can make Him so much more real than just talking to ourselves about Him. When we talk to ourselves, whether it be repeating Scripture or a lesson we’ve learned, we’re dealing with words and phrases. When we’re deep in the crap of life, many times words and phrases — and logic — don’t make sense. We look at these letters and sentences that we know helped us before, but for some reason they’re hollow, or they pack a gut punch that brings guilt or fear this time. We’re trying to go back to the promises of God, but the empty shells make us think we’d have been better off not turning to God at all.

The reason those words don’t help us the second or 50th time around is because they’re disconnected from the source that brought the power before. Many times, when God moves through Scripture or great writing about Him, it’s less about the phrasing or the way the words unravel our brain and more about the fact that He is there with us. He is the One teaching us, and we know it. That comfort and peace is what we’re seeking when we go back to those words later. Sometimes we find it; other times it’s elusive.

That’s where monuments can help. When we have an object or an image that connects us to the reality of a situation where we learned a truth, we often remember what it was like to know God was there. And God being there — God being with us — is the only thing that changes anything.

So, as I endeavor again to speak truth, to write about the goodness of God, and to sing God’s songs in a strange land, I want to write about one of my favorite monuments. Whenever I see this monument, I know God is there. I know it in my brain, and it hits me in the chest, my heart filling up with the immense feeling of knowing I’m loved.

The number 412 has had meaning for me for some time now. I’ve written about it before, and the summary version is this: Whenever I see 412, good things happen. It’s a number I saw every day going into work and every day when it was finally time to sleep (and it’s the name of a good Switchfoot song, which provides our requisite Switchfoot mention for this post).

I’ll be having the worst of days when I look at my phone and see it’s 4:12, and I have to smile, because that number has long been a reminder of God. “Hi, God. I’m ready to strangle the world, but I see that You just got me to look at the clock when it was 4:12. I guess You’re an OK Guy and that everything is fine.” 4:12 p.m. is also about the time every day that my body starts to cooperate and I exit the morning haze and head into feeling a little better.

So, I’ve loved 412 for a long time, and I didn’t think much of it. I’d see it on clocks or signs or something and say hi to God.

Then, a little while ago, I was having one of those rough nights where everything was just awful. I was wandering around my house and saw the photo albums my mom made for my siblings of our baby years. Mine is pink — very pink — a good reminder that you don’t really know what kind of person your child is going to turn into. I got my photo album out and sat down to look at the familiar memories.

I knew everything that was in that book. I’ve looked through it many times. I knew that on the first pages were pictures of me in the hospital right after I was born, and of a little trick-or-treat bag the nurses handed out, since I was born on Halloween. As I looked through this time, though, and in a very melancholy state, I had a different perspective.

I saw pictures of my mom and dad holding me and had this realization of how much they must really love me, and how much they loved me that day just because I was born. I have a couple of nieces now as well as friendships with a pile of teenagers who I love to watch grow, succeed, have fun, or just live — and knowing how I feel about all these kids gave me an inkling of what my parents must feel toward me.

That made me smile, and I kept flipping, over to the page where I knew my hospital birth card and my little footprint would be. There it was, with my weight, my height, and my birth time. I knew what it would be. My mom had always told me I was born at 4:30 in the morning. (“Do you want me to wake you up at the exact time you were born to say happy birthday?” “Yes! Yes!”)

I looked at it, my footprint, and my height, and my weight — and my birth time. It said I was born at 4:12 a.m. It was there on the hospital card, and the other card, and the fancy piece of paper my mom wrote out at the top of the page. I’m fanatical about numbers, and the time my mom had told me had been what I repeated and remembered my whole life. All these years, my little numbers brain had been given the wrong time for when I was born.

Twenty-eight years after I was born, and some five years after 412 became a significant number for me, I sat there on a dark and gloomy night and saw that I, in fact, had been born at 4:12 a.m.

It’s funny when I write this, as I know that while it causes me to tear up, pretty much everyone else who reads it will shrug and think I’m crazy. But don’t you get it? Don’t you see how it must have felt? It was like God stepped down and sat next to me in that lonely hallway and told me that, all this time, He has been there, connecting the dots. A number like that may not mean anything to anyone else, but He knew it meant something to me. And He wove it together, over years, up until that day when I really needed a physical, tangible sign that He knew I was there, and He cared about me.

It’s one thing when you have something you’ve always known, and you move forward from that point, reconciling everything back to where you started; it’s another when God takes your life on all these twists and turns, to the point that you think you’re going to float away forever and never find the ground, and then He shows you He’s had you tethered down the whole time. This narrative that had such meaning in my life had come full circle — and I saw how it happened without me even knowing the starting point.

So, I was born at 4:12. In the annals of history, it doesn’t mean a thing. But in my life, that’s a monument that can’t ever be torn down. It’s so much bigger than the ways I’d see 412 here and there or when I just liked that song. When I see 412 now, or the time comes up on my phone, it’s a call from God telling me to really, really remember His goodness, and that He is there. The best part is that I don’t have to just sit there and tell myself. I can feel it deep in my heart, and I almost always smile, slow down, and really know His presence.

It’s a coincidence that I’ve seen 412 all these times, right, just like it’s a coincidence that I happened to be born at that time? Coincidences are for people who don’t see God in the moment. He’s there all the time, poking us and telling us to look up. He wants us to see His goodness in the world around us, and He wants to remind us He loves us.

Some people may have more impressive monuments, or shinier ones. But my little monument reminds me God loves me, and that opens the door to everything else. When I know — boom, in my heart — that God loves me, all the promises and truth follow. Hope and joy become real things. I have more than the strength to live another day — I feel like I can fly, even when I can barely walk, barely write, barely think.

God is good. He’s been good since the minute I was born.