There’s Something About 7
Since I was young, 27 has always been my favorite number. There is something rough and angular about the shape of a seven next to the smooth curve and sharp lines of a 2. That was originally why I liked it. It also seemed to beckon of a promise to me: one thing about me that could be concrete, despite my constantly changing appearance, getting groups and hobbies. 27 was a steady, consistent friend.
Years passed and I kept her in my pocket, always there but not always speaking. That was until a counterfeit meaning came about. I was 19 and handed a ‘27 cigarette’ by a dark and satanic man. It seemed, to me, as if the meaning of 27 was finally being spoken to me, but it was a meaning I couldn’t handle. As I took the cigarette from him I felt the words that weren’t spoken echoing in my mind. 27. I was going to die at 27.
The 27 Club is a popular phenomenon about many famous and quote, unquote, “special” people that died at the young age of 27. From Kurt Cobain to Jim Morrison to Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. The list goes on. Like many popular social phenomena it carries a cult following with it in which petiole theorize the reasons for its existence: from faking deaths to the Illuminati. And, apparently in my own mind, I was special enough to be in this club.
But the problem, I found, wasn’t in the speculation behind these deaths in and of itself. The problem was the incident I experienced as I took that cigarette and heard, or felt, or knew, or feared, I wasn’t sure, my impending end that was now given a timeline. 27. I had 8 small years.
And then before I knew it time had passed and 27 was knocking at my front door. What had once been a faithful friend now acted as a foreboding cloud over my head. What I had hoped would be the best year of my life, for no reason other than liking how two numbers fit together, was now haunting me. But as I learned from my father, there is no better way to fight something than to turn and face out head on. What else could I do anyway? Time doesn’t stop for anyone (except Israel in the 10th book of Joshua).
As I recall this last year of my life, I can’t help but feel hurt, scared and marred. I found myself fighting with death more times than I can count, and not figuratively. The months felt more like decades, and the days felt like light-years. My mind became an endless knot of twists and turns that led nowhere, but to me, led to exactly the bullseye the devil intended, every time. I became a shell of a person, made up of only my mind’s endless rattle of satanic connections.
A false prophecy was given when I took that cigarette from that dark man, but I made it out. Not every word spoken over us comes from God’s mouth. No matter how true it seems. I don’t know the purpose for what I experienced, but I trust that what is now seen dimly will one day be fully clear and fully known, even as I, through the year of 27 have been fully known by God alone.
So somehow I have this feeling of hope. It’s small and fragile but it is present, and it is growing. Much like the original feeling that I drew from that silly, little number. Hope has now taken the place of 27 with better promises and a more eternal fate. A promise that it will not disappoint. Because, as we know, “…the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”
In a few days I turn 28. And I’ve realized that it isn’t the way that the 2 and 7 fit together that made it my favorite number. It wasn’t the angles or the possibility of what they could mean. It is, for some odd reason, how 2 and 7 seem like an unlikely pair. They’re not both odds or both evens, their connection doesn’t make up a perfect prime number, and they don’t seem to fit well into many mathematical formulas, that I’ve found. They’re mismatched, of different value (in the natural as well as in my own internal value system [7 of course being the better of the two]), and quite frankly, no better than any other number in the book.
And yet, they’re the perfect pair. Much like me and the One who walked with me through this last year. Much like me and the God who found me when I was still out there, at 19, in a land of darkness and straight-out-of-a-horror-story miseries.
27: a curved number with a hook and a straight-angled number that seems to stand for something when others give in. The 2 seems to melt into the 7, giving it its worth and giving it purpose.
Isn’t that me and God? Isn’t that how he placed something in me when I had nothing? When I was empty? Desolate, destitute.
I find myself in You.
And now, I’ll find myself in 28. Cheers to another year on this planet great.
