1968 = 2008??

Dennis Peacock has an interesting observation for those of us who lived thru those times:

2008: The Year of Destiny

As 2008 comes to an end, the significance of its relationship to the number forty (40) continues to fascinate me. Forty years ago it was 1968, arguably one of the most significant years of the twentieth century. In 1968 President Johnson shocked us all by declining to run again for President; the Tet Offensive shattered the nation’s confidence in terms of winning the war in Vietnam; Martin Luther King was assassinated; Robert Kennedy was assassinated; and Richard Nixon became president amidst the most diverse and culture-changing year in memory.

The counter culture was in full swing all over the western world, and the intelligence community here in the U.S. (I was later told) was actually considering the possibility of domestic revolutionary activity. Beyond all that, in 1968 I came back to Christ, married Jan, started a business, and fully dropped out of identifying with the “crazies.”

1968 saw the entrenchment of the drug culture in many of the world’s conservative universities and witnessed student revolts in multiple nations. No-fault divorce began its course across the nation, and Eastern religion swept into the West at unprecedented levels following its clear endorsement by the Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Yoga.

Forty is a very, very significant biblical number. The flood was created in forty days and nights of rain; Israel was forty years in the wilderness following Moses’ forty years in exile. David ruled Israel forty years as did numbers of prophets who served the Lord forty years. Jesus spent forty days fasting in the wilderness. I could go on… So is there a forty year cycle regarding 1928, 1968, and 2008, for example? I can see one.

2008, a year several of the nation’s most reliable prophets described as a “year of opportunity” or “a year of bridging to the future,” has been a most significant year both socially and personally. It was dominated socially by the presidential elections here in the U.S. They were unique in many ways as they bridged the 1960’s Vietnam generation and the following generation of those now in their forties, like Barack Obama. Who could miss John McCain, a Vietnam icon, running against a black man whose self-confessed greatest regret was that he wasn’t old enough in the 1960’s to have served the cause of the civil rights movement? This truly was the first “bridge election” since the 1960’s. That an African American won brings a measure of closure to the battle many of us fought for in the 1960’s.

To add to the drama, the current financial crisis is unique in global economic history. As one trained in economics, I can confidently state that it is a bridge to a new set of realities which will change all of our lives. So what happened to you this year? What opportunities and “bridges” have become evident? How is your future possibly altered by the events of 2008 and where is God in all of that? Please think about it. The future belongs to those who prepare for it.