A Midlife Assessment

“We’ve been going the right way, right?”

But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen. - 2 Peter 3:18

For most of my life, I have looked young for my age. Once, in graduate school, I was sitting in the back of a high school classroom for fieldwork when one of the teens raised her hand and told the teacher, “Miss, you have new student!” Much later, a mom I’d just met at a local playground (with a child the same age as mine) told me I still had time to go back to college. In recent years, when people have said I don’t look my age, I’ve half-jokingly replied that whatever the case, my body feels 10 years older than I am.

Ever since I hit my mid-twenties, age really has seemed to me more or less like “just a number.” I’ve forgotten how old I was, like really forgotten to the point where I was sad to move on from 37 because I realized too late that I’d gotten my age mixed up in my head all that year. This year though, the number has caught up to me. I am finally beginning to feel my age.

By “feeling my age,” I’m referring not so much to the sense of having grown into a specific two-digit number, but more so to the dawning realization that—regardless of whether or not I’ve been keeping track, and whether I did or did not think I was 38 for two whole years— I have been aging steadily all along, and that having done so, I’ve now entered middle adulthood. In the past year, it’s as if something shifted in the atmosphere and the mid-life-crisis type questions that had looked so cliché from afar have blown and settled in. It’s not just me—I’m talking to peers who are also prayerfully reevaluating, making pivots, wondering what needs to change if anything at all. The air feels different.

The questions, on the surface, seem identical to the ones I’ve been asking since my youth: What’s your will, God? What do I do now? But they’re more material, less nebulous than they used to be. As a young person, making a choice regarding the future felt like standing in front of an open map deciding which mountain range to climb, or at the very least, being at the bottom of a mountain with twenty possible paths before me. Now, the possibilities no longer feel limitless. (Part of aging is realizing that they never were.)

I’m in the thick of the woods now and though the path diverges every so often and the decisions I make at these crossroads still don’t come easy, I choose with a better sense of what the cost might be to walk the harder roads, how God has created me to walk, what load he has called me to bear, what pace is sustainable, and more confidence knowing his grace has proved sufficient thus far. I have a more realistic sense of my constraints, a greater contentment regarding roads not taken, a growing inkling of what a “convergence” (as one of my professors put it) of passions, gifting, and experience might look like for me vocationally. Still, I have some questions, ones that are less of the “Which mountain should I climb?” nature and more of the “We’ve been going the right way, right?” variety.

Perhaps it’s not about age, I want to say, but the confluence of the season of life I’m in with in my family, body, vocational choices, ministry. But it is though, about age. My wonderings are undeniably tethered to time. To the fact that my kids have grown to no longer need the same kind of help from me than they used to and yet require more of me in other ways; to the release from some of the burdens of childcare that makes my days feel more expansive now that the kids are all in school; to my body that bears not only signs of illness and childbearing, but wear and tear and changing rhythms; to the exciting fact that an emerging generation of ministry leaders are closer in age to my children than to me. I feel my age in how the years have managed to slipped through our family’s (metaphorical) countdown-to-college hourglass a few grains at a time until that mound of sand piling up at the bottom is shockingly higher than I’m ready for.

More than anything, I feel middle-aged in having walked enough years to sense the need to look back at this last stretch of road and ask, “So…what have I been about?,” with its attendant follow-up question, “Do I still want to be about that?”

To that second question, the Spirit has been graciously confirming that my spirit’s answer is indeed, yes. And that if God’s word for me in my youth was, Know me. It is now, grow in your knowledge of me and in my grace.

Regarding growing in grace, I told a fellow pastor’s wife a year or two ago that I’ve noticed new temptations in ministry that have come with age—temptations to impatience, ungraciousness, pride. This had surprised me then, but I now see this is true not just in ministry. I used to imagine I’d have to fight the same besetting sins my whole life, and while some old struggles still remain, I’ve found I need to also be vigilant for new ones. The temptations to entitlement, to bitterness and cynicism, to a kind of been-there-done-that-ness, to savoring past laurels and exalting myself, to neglecting to keep guard over my life and doctrine, to growing weary of doing good, these seem to be lining the paths I’m walking in new ways. In God’s mercy, I am relearning that this journey will be by his grace the whole way through. And I am praying that having known so much grace, I would grow quicker to extend grace myself.

As for growing in the knowledge of Christ, I am looking to my elders more and more with a new sense of wonder. I’m thinking of older believers, those who have been out of the middle-aged neck of the woods for a bit now, yet have not stopped seeking the Lord, not stopped repenting, not stopped growing in Christlikeness. God has shown me what he requires of me through these saints—to do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with my God.

I’ve been remembering how, as a seminary student, I once smugly asked an older pastor who’d returned to school how it was learning with all these young guys in our class. I’d said it hoping we’d riff on the, “Oh man, these inexperienced young people think they know so much, but they don’t know.” Instead, he talked about how great it was and how much he was learning from them. I want to learn from his example. If I want to know Christ more, I’ll have to.

So I am asking with a renewed fervor that I know to be a gift,

Please God, please let me walk humbly with you.

Please God, help me grow in grace.

Please God, I want to know you more.

Not long ago, I had occasion to face one of those repeated trials that, though familiar, still pushed all my buttons. Have I changed at all, I wondered, noticing the ways I’d stopped guarding my mind, how I’d allowed anger to grow to resentment. I’ve changed with age, I know. Less easily shaken by circumstances, more steady internally, all good things associated with the experience of becoming a more mature person with or without God. But in this circumstance, of being asked to love as Christ has loved me, had I truly grown in Christlikeness at all in the last ten years? The question shook me.

Have I truly grown? I hope so. I believe I have. But in that moment of self-assessment, when I couldn’t could say for sure, the Spirit brought to mind one thing—that if nothing else, in the last ten years, I have grown to know him more. I have known his grace in my weakness, his kindness leading to repentance, his steadfastness despite my unfaithfulness, his beauty in the cross of Jesus Christ. He has walked with me through hills and valleys, through shadow and celebration, in times of crises and in the blur of everyday life. He has carried me as I’ve sought to walk with him.

Decades deep, I know this: that I know him better than I used to. And by grace, on the other side of middle age, I will know him better than I do now.

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🪴 My book Peace Over Perfection: Enjoying a Good God When You Feel You’re Never Good Enough is available at Amazon | The Good Book Company | WTS Books | Christian Book | Barnes and Noble | Target

👩🏻‍💻 Some other places I’ve been since I last wrote here:

• I recorded the Peace over Perfection audiobook which is out now! If your library uses Hoopla, you may be able to find it there. It’s also available on Audible and other audiobook stores. 🎧🪴

• All We Have Left Undone I wrote this piece for Journeywomen Ministries drawing from Psalm 103.

• Lastly, an exciting snippet from my Instagram for those of you who aren’t on there:

  

  (Caption) Serving at the annual CCEF conference with WTS Books is always a highlight, but this year was extra special because it included: my firstborn + my first book 🪴 + and PoP’s first reprint!
  
  At last year’s CCEF conference, I was asked how it felt knowing that Peace over Perfection would be there the next year. I’d submitted the manuscript and was excited, but the prevailing feeling was anxiety about sales—less so for my own sake, but for the sake of the publisher that had taken a risk on me and my words. So it was God’s kindness to me that the (then) sales manager from my publisher was in attendance to encourage me about PoP and also assure me they knew what they were doing and I wouldn’t single-handedly be bankrupting them all.
  
  It’s a bit of a full-circle moment then to be back at the conference, seeing PoP getting into the hands of readers—and finding out that, unbeknownst to me, it’s on its second printing. 
  
  God is so kind. He didn’t have to, but he did. 🪴