The Leaves Are Off the Trees, Part 4 ... Solutions

So what should we do now?  We may be alive and well in our midlife years but each of us carries some degree of regret.  We may mourn our business or career choices.  Perhaps we are carrying around a heavy weight of parental guilt.  We may linger over things that we've done or even did not do in our marriages.  We may have regrets over not being more serious about our relationships with God.  If we're sinners living in a fallen world [and we, of course, are] then it is impossible to look back at a legacy of perfect choices.

We will carry these regrets until we are finally home with our Lord.  But then, consider that future:  no reason any longer to even want to un-think a thought, un-say a word, or undo a choice.  We will not only be in remarkable peace with God, but we will finally be at complete peace with all of our choices and behaviors.  We will have finally passed over into a regretless eternity.  So there is hope for all of us.

We should also remember that it is not like we are about to die [or at least not most of us].  We are in the MIDDLE of our lives.  There is still much before us.  We can each participate in a real turn in our stories.  As God's children, we have reason to step forward in faith, hope and courage, embracing the new life that is always available to us because of the person and work of Christ.  So what kind of practical strategies are there that we may employ to this end?

1.  Enjoy the freedom of confession.  So what is that?  It is the freedom to say about ourselves what both God and we know is true, without fear of rejection, condemnation or punishment.  Confession is more than an obligation; it is one of the wonderful freedoms we have in our lives in Christ.  We are free to own up to, without fear, the darkest of our thoughts and motives, the ugliest of our words, our most selfish choices, and our most rebellious and unloving actions.  We are completely freed from our bondage to guilt and shame.

Confession is powerful and effective.  It turns guilt into forgiveness.  It turns regret into hope.  It turns slavery into freedom.  We are no longer trapped and things are not hopeless.  Our God, the One who never changes is also the One who promises and produces deep personal change.  The changes He makes in us are so foundational that the Bible's best word description is "new creation."  It's as if we are no longer ourselves but something brand new.

Confession is not only owning responsibility before God and the appropriate people [those who our sin and failures have affected], but it is also refusing to be stuck in our regrets and refusing to give up hope. 

2.  Embrace God's forgiveness.  In a fallen world, we don't really expect much forgiveness.  We see the indiscretions of our politicians and leaders paraded before us by the media on almost a daily basis.  Stupid choices we may have made early in our careers tend to be resurrected with every new job application.  Our poor financial choices follow us for years on our credit reports and can prevent us from qualifying for mortgages, getting new jobs and even cause us to pay more for whatever insurance policy we may now be trying to buy.  Married women seem to carry the coldness and insensitivity that they may have experienced from their fathers for years and decades after they have leave home.  Our mothers-in-law tend to repeatedly overlook our progress from the arrogance and impulsivity that we displayed in our much younger years.  Yes, in a fallen world, our records tend to go with us and gets flung back into our faces again and again.  In a fallen world, it is very difficult to outlive our pasts.

This is precisely why God's promise of full and complete forgiveness is so unusual and so wonderful.  God, who sees and knows everything about us, even our most secret thoughts and desires, has promised and purchased for us a blanket of forgiveness so complete that it is incomprehensible in this life.  He literally chooses to remove our sins "as far as the east is from west" in His memory [Psalm 103:12].  Think about that for minute.  The God of the universe, whose memory is completely exhaustive, chooses to remove our sins from His memory.  Even though our very sins are a direct affront to His authority, a devaluation of His wisdom, and a rejection of His love, He is so great in mercy and grace that He is willing to erase each and every one of them from His memory.  And because He does this, He releases us from our bondage to regret.  We no longer must live looking backward.  We are truly free to move on.

3.  Embrace God's sovereignty.   One of the surest and sweetest things that Scripture continuously reminds us of is that, contrary to appearances, our lives are never out of control.  No, they are always under the careful, wise, loving and powerful care of the Lord.  He is truly sovereign.  Even though it is nearly impossible for us to look around and see it in operation, there is no situation, relationship or circumstance that is not under His control.  He is always in charge.  He always knows what He is doing and why He is doing it.

Now, fortunately, His absolute control is exercised in such a way that it never turns us into robots.  Somehow, He is able to accomplish His sovereign purpose through the choices we make and the actions we take.  His sovereignty does not invalidate our choices, and our choices do not negate His sovereignty.  In the operation of the universe, the issue of the sovereignty of God and our responsibility is never an either-or; it is always a both-and.  We live our lives knowing that we are responsible for the choices we make, while at the same time knowing that God controls the details of our lives for our good and for His glory.

This balance is very important to remember during the struggles of midlife.  It also particularly important when we consider another incredible aspect of God's sovereignty:  His timing.  God's timing is always right.  He never gets things out of order.  He never does something too early or too late.  He is always able to decide between "what is best" and "when is best."  Yet in the midyears of life, it is almost impossible to look back and not revisit the question of God's timing.  Still, we should take responsibility for what we've done but trust His timing.  He gave us eyes to see what we needed to see at just the right moments.  He taught us important truths at just the right moments.  He brought people into our lives at just the right moments.  He knows who we are.  He knows what we can bear and what it going on around us at all times and His rule in our lives is always exercised at just the right time.

4.  Clarify our identities.  We as people are always measuring our potential.  The toddler stands wobbling in the middle of the room and wonders if he can manage the few steps needed to reach his mother's knee.  The kindergartener nervously scans all the other kids in the classroom and nervously wonders if she will be able to measure up.  The teenager, starting his first job, considers his potential for success and what having money of his own will open up for him.  The college freshman careens from excitement to dread, wondering if she will succeed or fail.  And we, in midlife, as we scan the sins, victories, and failures of our past, wonder what options remain for us in this life.  Will we be trapped by our pasts?  Are things now the way they will always be? 

Our assessment of our potential is always rooted in our sense of identity.  The "what can we do?" questions are always attached to the "who do we think we are?" answers.  The longer we live, the more we will tend to take on a sin and problem-based identity.  The blinders are off, and we are no longer deluded.  We have seen our harvests.  And it is tempting to let these things define us.  Perhaps some have been divorced and while divorce is a very difficult experience, it is not an identity.  Dittos for being a single parent.  While that is a very difficult experience, it is not an identity.  If we allow our experiences to become our identities they will define how we assess our potentials.

There was probably no man who ever walked the face of the earth more aware of his sin than the Apostle Paul, yet he refused to let his sin define him:  "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.  The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me" [Galatians 2:20].  His identity is not sin or problem-based, but grace-based.  He is essentially saying, "This is who I am -- a child of God.  When Christ died, I died; and when Christ rose, I rose to new life.  Not only that, but the living Christ dwells inside of me and because this is true, I am no longer living by my own power but by the power of Christ living in me."  It cannot be overstated that as we do the archeological work of midlife, we must not forget who we really are in Christ.  He is our potential!  He is our hope!  We can change!  Things can be different!

5.  Plant a new harvest.  The one comfort for both farmers and gardeners everywhere is that today's harvest will be followed by another season of planting and harvest.  Until we die, no harvest is ever the final harvest.  Our God is the author of new seasons.  He is the giver of new seeds, new roots and new fruit.  He causes flowers and fruit to grow where weeds and thorns once ruled.  He is the God of the new harvest.

In midlife, God calls us to turn from mourning over our previous harvest to planting new and better seeds.  If our parenting didn't turn out so well, maybe those relationships can be mended and restored.  Or perhaps we can be much better grandparents than we ever were as parents and sow spiritual seeds into the souls of the next generation.  If we let our careers control our previous lives maybe we can take advantage of the time we have left and the new economic freedom that midlife often affords and plant new seeds.  Perhaps we should work less and invest in family and ministry more.  Maybe we've squandered many years that we could have spent studying Scripture but we now have many new opportunities to increase our knowledge of God's Word and our potential for ministry [on-line seminary classes, evening Bible schools, etc.].  Perhaps we grieve our previous selfish lives, where all that we earned was spent on more comfortable lives for us.  We can now commit to finding specific ways that we can both give and serve.  We can consider which of our gifts, experiences, resources and wisdom can be best used in the service of others.  As we assess our harvests, we should live with a "new seasons" mentality.  Remember that the final chapter(s) has/have not yet been written.

6.  Celebrate eternity.  Paul makes this critical observation in 1 Corinthians 15:19 when he says, "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men."  As we know, this life that God has called us to doesn't make any sense without eternity attached to it.  It is only the hope and promise of a resurrection out of this life and of an eternity to follow that enables us to continue to live in this fallen world.  This world is a terribly broken place.  Nothing in us or around us operates consistently the way it was meant to.  Things regularly occur that were never meant to happen in God's original creation plan.  Sin still twists our desires and distorts our thoughts.  It still drips, like a horrible black dye, and stains every situation and relationship in our lives.  We are surely wiser than we once were, but we have not escaped our sin.

So we must accept the fact that we are sinners living in a fallen world but we must keep reminding ourselves that Christ really does live inside each of us and we must keep our eyes on eternity.  Start celebrating early.  We should let the anticipation build in us like a child counting down the days until he goes to Disney World.  We need to keep rewinding and playing the video of eternity in our minds.  The day really is coming when we will not only be released from this terribly broken world but where we will finally and forever be rescued from ourselves.  In that final place there will be no midlife regret.  There will be no things that were poorly done or left undone.  There will be no words to take back.  There will be nothing to confess and no need to repent and reconcile.  There will be no unwise investments or impulsive decisions to mourn.  The world will finally operate as it was meant to.   Whether we are aware of it or not, every moment of regret we experience is a longing for eternity.  Every instance of remorse is a cry for a better place.  Every experience of guilt and shame is our heart reaching out for a day when it will all be wiped away.  We should let our longing grow.  We should let our celebration begin.  We must live with our eyes set on eternity.  It is the only way we can make sense out of what is going on now.  Remember, Jesus is preparing a place for each of us even now.

The Leaves Are Off the Trees, Part 3

The reason regret tends to hit us so hard in midlife is that for years we have been convincing ourselves that the problem isn't really us.  Perhaps that is the biggest and most tempting lie that all of us tend to embrace ... our greatest problems exist somewhere OUTSIDE of us.  This is an attractive distortion because we are surrounded, in this fallen world, by people and things that are not operating as they were designed to -- so there is no shortage of available things or people to blame.  We can always find someone in our lives who hasn't responded to us properly.  We can always find unfairness and difficulty in the situations and circumstances that we have had to go through.  And it will always be tempting to see this as proof that the fruit that we are harvesting actually belongs to someone else.

So why is it that the regrets of midlife hit us so hard?  And can we turn them around as occasions for significant spiritual renewal?  Paul Tripp offers four possible explanations that I will loosely paraphrase:

1.  We have tended to be our own personal con man.  Kris Lundgaard points this out very powerfully in his wonderful book, The Enemy Within.  A con man appeals to something for which we have a very strong desire.  Perhaps he offers us something we would not normally be able to afford at a seemingly bargain price [think beachfront property on the Gulf of Mexico].  Or maybe he offers us quick release from an area of personal obligation [perhaps a quick and easy relief from debt].  The "hook" of the con man always offers us something we crave.  In our sin, we offer ourselves spiritual beachfront property that is in reality a stinking swamp of sin.  Or he gives us what anyone who is aware of his sin craves:  freedom from guilt.  Yet it is this very deepening awareness of sin that God uses to draw us into a greater dependence on Him and into a greater celebration of His grace.  When we play the con man and offer ourselves false atonement, we take ourselves off the moral hook.  In doing so, we not only get in the way of His sanctifying mercies, but we set ourselves up for moments of shock and dismay when it becomes glaringly clear that we were not, in fact, as righteous as we thought.

2.  We have signed a premature armistice agreement with our sin nature.  In the war with Iraq, the United States learned that one of the most important decisions in a time of war is when to declare victory and sign a peace agreement.  If this is done too soon, the enemy is given an opportunity to do more damage in a covert war than he did in the traditional overt front line combat.  This leads to confusion and an unnecessary loss of life and many needless injuries.  The cessation of major battles does NOT mean that the war is over.  A good general knows the difference between a series of single battle victories and total victory in the larger war.

This is exactly what we too often fail to remember in our wars with sin.  Because God has brought us to Himself and delivered us from many sins, we begin to live with a peacetime mentality.  Yes, we ARE new creatures, and yes, the controlling power of sin over us HAS been broken, but the presence of sin still remains.  This means that the great moral and spiritual war still rages on within each of us.  Thus, this is NOT the time to invest in the luxuries of leisure and peace, because shooting, bombing and pillaging still rages on.  We live as if there were peace but THERE IS NO PEACE!!!  We cannot allow ourselves to confuse single-battle victories of sanctification with the ultimate cessation of conflict when Christ returns.  Sin and righteousness, the flesh and the Spirit, are at war.  There is no peace, only battles won and battles lost.  Peace has been purchased.  It is guaranteed.  It will come.  But until then, the war of wars never ceases.  The delusions of victory, and the feeling of peace that follows, sets us up for the shock and disappointment of midlife regret.  We sadly must admit that we are still being bombed by an enemy -- sin -- that we may have believed we had long since defeated.  This what Paul spoke of in Ephesians 6:10-24 ... what makes each of the dimensions of our lives so difficult is that each one is a spiritual battleground.  He reminds us that our struggles are not against flesh and blood.  People and situations are not our real problem.  Our problem is that all our relationships and situations are taking place in the middle of a great war.

3.  We feed the beast and then are surprised when we get bitten.  Do you remember when the famous tiger tamer Roy Horn, of the renowned tandem Siegfried and Roy, was mauled by a tiger under his watch during a performance on October 3, 2003 in Las Vegas?  As an aside, has it really been 8.5 years since that happened?  Seems like 1-2 years to me.  But isn't that just like life in midlife?  The attack happened when he was alone on stage with a 600 lb. tiger that was refusing to obey.  In a spontaneous act of authority, Roy Horn bonked the tiger on the forehead with his microphone.  In anger, the tiger lunged at Horn and clamped his jaws around Horn's throat and dragged him off-stage while the audience watched paralyzed in horror.  Horn was all too relaxed and in dangerous proximity to the beast.  Had he not been, he would not have ended up in the ICU fighting desperately for his very life.

The Bible present the enemy as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour [1 Peter 5:8].  Perhaps like the zookeepers, the lion tamers, et al. we most often get bitten when we have been feeding the beast.  We get ourselves in trouble when we feed the beast little morsels of our hearts and lives.  No, we don't really intend to get swallowed up, but we tend to be overly naive about the danger we put ourselves into ... about the presence, power, attractiveness and danger of sin.  All of us, in our individual ways, feed the beast every day.  We harbor bitterness or envy.  We permit ourselves that brief lustful look or thought.  We permit moments of anger against our children or our spouses.  We allow ourselves to be comfortable with our materialism or greed.  No, we aren't committing the "big" sins, but we are sowing subtle and sadly acceptable seeds of sin that will someday reap a harvest of regret.  The regrets that we face in midlife more often than not result from our being much too casual in our every day battles with sin.

4.  We have bandaged our wounds without healing our diseases.  If we have the typical boils of MRSA, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, on our bodies that continue to reappear, we shouldn't be satisfied with just putting Neosporin ointment and Band-Aids on them.  We should realize that there must be an underlying infection in our system that is causing these boils to recur.  The boils are not really the true problem and unless we treat the MRSA, the boils will never really go away.

So it is with our struggle with sin.  It is very tempting to think that bandaging the sores will alleviate the disease.  But we should know better.  Consider the words of Christ as He confronted the Pharisees in Matthew 23:25-26:  "Woe to you, teachers of the Law and Pharisees, you hypocrites!  You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.  Blind Pharisee!  First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean."  Christ is basically saying, "You guys have it all wrong!  What you are attempting to do will never work.  You try to exchange good behavior for bad behavior [the outside of the cup and dish] but that will never work, because the heart [the inside of the cup and dish] has not been addressed.  Only when the heart changes will lasting change take place in your behavior as well."

Too often we are satisfied with the Pharisees' approach.  We hold our tongues.  We walk away.  We avoid tough situations.  We make changes in our relationships, circumstances, schedules and locations.  All of this serves only to fool us into thinking that we have dealt with the "disease," when really all we have done is alleviate the symptoms.  We think lasting change is taking place but the causal system of the heart remains unaddressed.  If our battle with sin could have been solved by behavioral therapy/techniques or strategic changes in our situations, locations, relationships and schedules then Jesus would not have had to come to earth and suffer and die on the cross.  The golden promise of the new covenant work of Christ is a new heart!  There is no other way.  There is no other hope for fallen, sin-riddled humanity.

Lastly, what does all this have to do with midlife regret?  Our externalism [dealing with the symptoms of sin] tricks us into thinking that we have dealt with much more than we actually have.  Because of this, when we enter the looking-back period of midlife, we tend to get caught up short.  We begin to see patterns that we thought we long ago dealt with have, in fact, continued.  We start to realize that what we thought we had conquered continues to plaque and defeat us so many years later.  It can really become a time when we cry out with Paul, "What a wretched man I am!"  When we look at these four factors that collectively form the Great Astonishment of Midlife and consider how they impact its regrets, it is no wonder that we get surprised, shocked and saddened by our legacies.  When our harvest comes in, it can hurt to admit that it is really ours.  This can be a very significant moment.  Because now we are able to see, likely with greater clarity than perhaps we have ever been able to see along the way, and as a result, this can be a moment fraught with both danger and potential.  This moment of personal honesty and truth can be either crushing and paralyzing, or it can be the beginning of a remarkably new phase of redemptive insight, change and personal celebration.

To be continued ...

The Leaves Are Off the Trees, Part 2

There was a time when there was no reason in the world for regret.  Everything people [well two people anyway] thought, desired, said and did was completely in accordance to the will of the Creator.  Imagine, as a husband approaching his 30th wedding anniversary celebration, looking back on my marriage and not having a single thing to regret.  Or being a parent sitting with our grown kids and reminiscing on our years of child-rearing and literally having nothing to regret.  Imagine pondering our relationship with God over decades and having no regrets.  Just remembering our every thought, word and deed without any guilt or remorse.  As hard as it may be to believe, this was the way the Creation was originally intended to be and, in fact, once was.

But on that horrible day with the serpent in the Garden, the innocent beauty of the regretless world was shattered.  And it still lies in pieces around us.  There may be no more common human experience than regret.  It follows us all the time.  It stains the very sheets of our existence.  We can close our eyes and pretend its not there, but every time we reopen them, we see the stains of regret everywhere.  It marks even the best of our family moments, stains the sweetest of our romantic encounters, leaves spots on the best of our friendships and colors the most honorable of our intentions.  It is literally inescapable.  The idle word, the impulsive choice, or the wayward desire ... they all cause us regret.  We wish we could take back choices.  We wish we could grab our words out of the air.  We wish we could relive situations and rewrite the scripts of our relationships.  But we cannot.  The leaves are off the trees, and regret is our harvest.

This is our world, a place where regret reigns.  It is the classes in high school and early college that I blew off and did less than my best.  It is the giving in to too many pizzas and snacks in my diet.  It is the career that I have allowed to command too much of my time and energy and resulted in too much time away from home ... especially when my kids were young.  It is the many ministry opportunities that I let slip through my fingers.  It is even the times when I let the opinion of others too strongly influence me.  It is spending way too many years in debt.  It is the material things that I let command my eyes and control my heart.  It is the big house that I had to have [Janna would be happy to live in a double-wide ... maybe even a single-wide] but that we didn't really "need."  It is not enough time with my kids and too much time for me in my man-cave.  It is too often being "too tired" or "too busy" for a consistent and meaningful devotional life with God.  It is being driven too much by envy and motivated too much by greed.  It is being too willing to respond to evil with evil.  It is universally human while being intensely personal.  Yes, we all live in a place where regret abides.

Yet, in the face of this crushing regret, we are not without hope.  In fact, it is this very same regret that points us to our need.  Beneath each moment of regret is a cry for a better place.  The blues songs of regret call us to look for the joyful hymns on the other side.  For there is coming a day when our last regret is felt and our final remorse will die.  On the other side, there will no longer be any bad choices, unwise reactions, inappropriate thoughts or evil desires.  In fact, that is the brightest and most wonderful of realities ... in eternity we will be delivered from our weakness and sin and therefore freed from regret.  But for now, embedded in every mundane flash of regret and every heavy load of remorse is a deep and abiding longing for a better place, a place where failure gives way to victory and sin gives way to righteousness.  Yet until that day, we have no choice really but to look back and feel the searing pain of regret.

And this is not something we just decide to do.  Almost without even realizing it, we seem to slip from living like an astronaut to living like an archeologist.  Our lifestyles while still young were all about launching with both courage and expectancy into worlds unknown.  It was all about new trajectories, new locations and new discoveries.  Distance between where we were and where we wanted to be didn't discourage us ... no, it more challenged us.  We wanted every day to be different and we were not afraid of change.  But as we get older we change occupations.  We begin to realize that we are now living with a fundamentally different mentality than we had 20-30 years ago.  We no longer launch toward what could be; now we spend more time uncovering and critiquing what once was.  We begin to take an archeologist's approach to life.

And thus, midlife often becomes a long-term dig into the mounds of our existences, and it can often be difficult to face what we may uncover.  This happens largely because we become progressively less able to convince ourselves that things will be different in the future or that we still have time to do things a different way.  Our past progressively takes on more power than does our future.  It can be discouraging work, but in our midlife years we all seem to be drawn to digging.

It also can be dangerous work, because the dig does not have scientific objectivity.  We are uncovering deeply personal moments that can be fraught with drama and consequence.  We begin to see ourselves as maybe we never have before.  It can be a bit breathtaking and even a bit paralyzing.  Some of us get stuck and never come back up out of our archeological hole.  We want so much to be able to go back and walk the streets of our past.  And thus the regrets have a tendency to just pile up one on top of the other.

So what are we to do?  First of all, we must shatter once and for all our own myths of our personal righteousness.  This is precisely where the Bible dissects and exposes midlife regret.  The reason regret has such power to depress, derail and paralyze us is that regret calls us to not only confess that we have failed, but also to let go of the fantasies of our righteousness.  The archeological work of midlife exposes fully just who we have been all along.  The problem is that what has been exposed doesn't synch with who we thought we were over all these years.  Scripture says that "if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us" [1 John 1:8].  It says this because we are all too easily blinded to the depth and consistency of our sin.  We repeatedly tend to underestimate just how susceptible our hearts are to living under rulership other than the Lord's.  But He knows just how crucial it is for us to see things as they really are.  So, as we brush the dirt off the artifacts of our lives, He puts us in a position to see that any good thing that we uncover is the result of His grace.  And in this way, midlife can be an occasion of profound and lasting spiritual change.  It can be a time where we both understand His grace and the Gospel in ways that are much deeper and more personal than maybe we did when we were younger.

To be continued ...

The Leaves Are Off the Trees, Part 1

Those of you who know me know that I love the fall [almost as much as I do the spring] but I dislike autumn.  I love the finally moderating temperatures of the fall and am always happy when the suffocating heat and humidity of north Florida summers are finally in the rear-view mirror.  It is also finally football season, which I dearly love and long for, and the time for Saturday tailgate parties where our family and friends gather for a meal and fellowship before we head into Doak S. Campbell Stadium to watch the Seminoles hopefully triumph on the gridiron.

But autumn is a very different thing.  Autumn is a time of harvest, a time where we realize that we cannot go back and do it all over again.  It seems with each passing year that I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable with autumn.  It is almost like I want to stomp out into my yard and glue the leaves back onto the five massive live oak trees that adorn our property along with the dozen or so dogwoods.

Midlife is essentially a time of harvest.  The leaves are off the tree and there is no putting them back.  The world will not spin backwards on its axis and there is no turning back the clock.  It's no wonder I love the spring so much.  The weather is finally warmer after a long cold winter [and us paying through the nose for propane to heat this over-sized house] and the world is set for a fresh start.  In our part of the country, the Bradford pears and dogwoods bud and then are covered with blossoms.  Shortly afterwards the azaleas explode with color lasting almost a month.  It is a truly glorious six to eight weeks here when the gloom of winter yields to the grandeur of spring.  And it changes our psyches.  We begin to imagine the possibilities of our lives and everything suddenly seems possible.  Not so with autumn.  Autumn is the time when each of us in very important ways reaps what we have sown.

For most of our youth and early adult lives we have lived wondering just how it will all turn out.  We spend countless days, months and even years planting, watering and weeding.  We were looking forward.  We envisioned the harvest but it was cloudy, unclear and even uncertain.  But we kept working and refused to give up hope.  And now all of the sudden we find ourselves spending more time looking backward than we do forward.  It can be both disorienting and uncomfortable at first.  When we've spent so much time planting, it almost seems weird and unnatural to harvest, but we have no choice really.

Looking back is both wonderful and dangerous, delightful and sad.  It can be filled with joy or stained with tears and oftentimes is both.  It can cause us to soar with thankfulness or plummet with regret and the mix of these two extremes makes it all the more difficult.  And depending on our personality type this mix makes it difficult for the thanksgiving part not to be completely covered by the leaves of regret.

For me this has been a time of thankful reminiscence, but the fact is that none our children no matter how spiritually inclined, have turned out just like we either imagined or dreamed.  They make choices that we wouldn't make [even though so far they've all made better choices than I did at their respective ages (I am sure this is largely attributable to their mother) ... let's just hope this continues].  And I am still waiting for my first child to apply to medical school.  They all share my faith but they don't share all my values.  However, as time goes by, they seem to be coming around in that regard too.  I finally have a house full of football-loving Seminoles [two degrees from the University of North Florida notwithstanding].  They also tend to become more candid about my weaknesses and failures and how they are determined to avoid them.  So it is hard to look back at my life as a parent and even as a husband and be singularly thankful, because looking back honestly will include remembering many moments of weakness and sin.

No, we weren't always the parents or spouses that we wanted to be.  Yes, we were dedicated to raising our kids to know and love God and we were always looking for ways to do that better.  We sought to make God's presence obvious in the lives of our kids and we talked much and often about the Gospel.  We endeavored to be faithful in correction, instruction and discipline.  But in all of this there was one glaring and huge problem:  we did it all as sinners.  There were so many times that our sin got in the way of our parenting or even in relating to each other as husband and wife and father and mother.  In midlife, these are the moments we tend to remember.  Too often we were in the way of what God was doing rather than being a part of it.  But now, there is little we can do about it.  My youngest child, Andrew, has a mere 18 months left before he heads off to college.  His oldest sister, Ashley, is married, involved in a nursing career and thinking about starting a family.  My middle daughter, Alli, is engaged to be married this summer and is a missionary kindergarten teacher in Caracas, Venezuela.  Ariel is a junior in the nursing program at Florida State University and has a steady boyfriend, who is a Gator [this gets to point of our kids making choices that we wouldn't necessarily make or having different values than we have:)].  Yes, the leaves have just about all fallen off the trees.

Midlife is a reflective time.  In our youth, even though we have not reached our goals, we tell ourselves that we have plenty of time left.  But the more life that we have behind us, the more dreams give way to reflection, and before long we are spending much more time looking backward than looking forward.  We become regular spectators of the people that once were rather than who is.  And sadly, we don't always like what we see.  The person on the screen of our memories struggles much more than we ever wanted to struggle.  We wish we could go back and do things the right way, if only we could do it a second time.  We wish we could have wiser eyes, more perceiving ears,  clearer minds, softer tongues and more tender hearts.  But there is no going back.

To be continued ...

Our Hearts as Idol Factories ... Especially in Midlife, Part 2

It is important to realize that the struggles we face in our midlife years are a window to the deeper, more fundamental struggles of our lives.  If this is true, and in my last my blog I made the case for this, that we tend to replace spiritual realities with physical/material realities, then it easily follows just how physical aging can become such a huge emotional and spiritual struggle for us.  The fact remains that we were never meant to get our identities from our physical bodies, but clearly we do.  We were never meant to get our sense of security and safety from our physical bodies, but nevertheless we do.  Our physical strength and health were never meant to be the source of our hope, but they oftentimes are.  The take home message really is this:  our struggle with the changes that occur to our bodies during midlife and beyond reveal the idols that have been with us for a very long time.  Aging just forces them up to surface.  Many of us [myself sadly included] need to confess that we have not been functionally trusting in God at all.  And when the thing that we have been trusting in [our physical body, our mind, our craftiness, our income, our relationships, etc.] fails us, we become sad, angry, envious, discouraged, obsessed and even depressed.

Yet physical things still have a great power to seduce us.  Because our hearts are deceitful, they easily migrate from worship of and service to the Creator, to worship of and service to the creation without us even perceiving it.  There are at least five great dangers inherent in this.

First, and most obvious, is that physical things are impermanent.  Everything that is physical decays, grows old, grows stale, wears out, or falls apart [this is the second law of thermodynamics after all and these are laws that are never broken].  Nothing that we look at today will be exactly the same tomorrow.  Despite their appearance of permanence, physical things are really transient and unpredictable and thus are a really poor place to place our hopes.  They will always fail us in the end.

Secondly, physical things are deceptive.  They may appear to deliver what they cannot, in fact, deliver.  This why there are so many Scriptures that refer to idols as having "eyes that cannot see, ears that cannot hear, and mouths that cannot speak."  Jeremiah even says that we have to nail them to a platform or they fall over, and that we have to carry them around because they cannot walk.  Every promise of every idol is a lie.  For all their perceived attractiveness, they cannot give us what it is that we are looking for.  It can never happen.  So to seek life in idols are acts of personal and spiritual insanity.  It will never be found.  Still, sadly, even that head knowledge too seldom stops my wayward heart.

Physical things are impersonal.  Worship in its purest form is a relationship.  Each of us were created for relationship with God.  These are meant to be personal relationships of communion, love, allegiance, worship, dependency; and obedience is meant to be the axis on which our individual worlds revolve.  Our worship of God is meant to be intensely personal.  Our spirits are to connect with the Spirit in a communion so profound that there are not even words to describe it.  We as people were made for this foundational connection of spirit to Spirit.  Trying to replace this with things that we can see, touch, taste, feel or use, but never have relationships with, robs us of our essential humanity.

It probably should be noted here that we have some degree of control over the physical things in our lives, even our own bodies [I will grant that as we age there does seem to be a progressive loss of this control].  But we can alter the shapes and conditions of our bodies with diet, exercise and even plastic surgery.  We can invest in makeup or a new wardrobe.  To a degree there are things we can control.  But we cannot control God or our relationship to Him.  Thus, proper worship involves not only putting God where He belongs but also surrendering control of our lives to Him.  This is where the seduction of impersonal things come in ... they put us where we are in control, the place where all sinners want to be.  And this is probably the greatest allure of idolatry and also its greatest danger.  We were never meant to be in control, and when we are, we just about always make a big mess of things.

Physical things are enslaving over time.  This is probably the cruelest trick of idolatry.   What we think we have under control is, at that very moment, in the process of enslaving us.  Our desires for physical things morph into "needs," and when they do, we become completely convinced that we cannot live without them.  We see this dynamic play out as people relate to their own bodies ... what was once a desire to be fit morphs into an all-consuming time and money-draining life focus.  A desire to be slim morphs into anorexia or into an unending pursuit of the next miracle diet.  A decision to have a cosmetic surgical procedure morphs into a sad obsession with altering the very looks and shapes of our bodies.  A desire to look nice morphs into a constant anxiety about our appearance and an unrelenting envy of those who look like we wish we did.  This enslaving, addicting quality of idolatry is ignored at our peril.

Lastly, replacing spiritual things with physical things is deadly.  What is the danger of worshiping physical things.  Consider the metaphor of the caged canary taken deep into the earth with a group of coal-miners.  They keep a careful watch over that canary, knowing full well that if the canary starts gasping for breath or dies, they have precious little time left.  These miners of old knew that breathing any gas other than oxygen wasn't an option; to try to do so would lead only to death.  In the same way, it is critically important that we remember that life is only found in the Creator.  And any physical thing that appears to be life-giving is only an illusion.  Jonah said it this way, "Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs."

In summary, the struggles of physical aging, which so often comes to the forefront during midlife, are the reflection of a much deeper struggle.  It is essentially the struggle of struggles for our hearts.  There will be a day when this struggle is finally over, and God will own our hearts unchallenged for eternity.  But today that struggle continues.  So God, in the grandeur of His redemptive love, will do what is necessary to reclaim our wandering hearts.  These painful moments are neither the result of His unfaithfulness nor His inattention; they are rather the products of His lovely grace.  He loves us with an eternal and jealous love.  He did not shed the blood of His Son for us only to lose us to some  physical thing in the creation.

God fights for us with the full might of His redemptive hand.  He is willing to make us uncomfortable and sad.  He is willing to bring us through suffering and grief.  He is willing to shake us and unsettle us.  He is willing to squash our dreams and deflate our hopes.  He is willing to let what ever we have craved for [that is not from Him] slip like sand through our fingers.  And He does all of these things because we are precious to Him.  He will not allow us to live in the delusion that what we have found elsewhere what can only be found in Him.

So, in the end, our struggles with physical aging are really the struggles between idolatry and grace.  The Lover of our souls is using the occasion of midlife and the realities of aging to expose and deliver us from the idols that resided in secret and ruled us unseen.  We must reject the self-pity, envy and discouragement that occur so commonly at this time.  We should look to heaven and be thankful.  We are, in fact, being rescued.  We should celebrate the One who again and again delivers us from what we, by ourselves, are powerless to escape.  And we can join Paul in saying, "Yes, outwardly I am wasting away, but I have real hope and real joy, because inwardly I am being renewed day by day."  For what life is really about can never be weakened by age or destroyed by years!

Our Hearts as Idol Factories ... Especially in Midlife, Part 1

What does God's Word say that just might be directly applicable to us in midlife?  There is a simple sentence tucked into the first chapter of Romans that provides insight into our lives at every age, but it is especially true at this stage of our lives.  Romans 1:25 provides us with a very insightful paradigm for understanding our lives on this side of eternity:  "They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator -- who is forever praised.  Amen."  Because of the worship language in this passage, it is too easy to miss just how comprehensive this insight is.  There is far more being said here than just the fact that we tend to serve a whole catalog of God replacements.  While it is true that we all tend to have an inertia away from the Creator and toward the creation, there is more being said to us here.

This passage also is alerting us to the fact that there is an innate tendency in each of our hearts to replace the spiritual with the physical.  We all do this in many ways.  Yet the truth of the matter remains that life can only be found in the Creator.  Still how often do we find ourselves seeking to find our lives in the material world, the love of another person, the security in our physical situation or location, or simply in physically experienced pleasure or comfort?  Idolatry, in its simplest form, occurs when we replace the worship of God with some physical image or object that we can see or touch.  The reasons this is so tempting is fairly obvious.  The idol can be seen, touched or somehow physically experienced.  We can sit in our plush homes and look around saying, "What a great lives we have."  Or maybe we feel this when the lips of the one we love caresses our cheek.  Or maybe when we hear the applause of others or experience the glory of physical beauty of certain places on earth.  Or maybe when we experience the comfort and joys of a wonderful meal or the physical pleasure or release of a sexual encounter with the one we love.  Or maybe it occurs when we experience the affirmation of others on our appearance or perhaps on our job.  It can be very tempting to replace the spiritual with the physical.

If sin sets us on a trajectory away from the Creator and toward the creation, then it also sends us away from the spiritual and toward the physical.  So appearance trumps character; personal pleasure trumps purity of heart; the love of another trumps the love of God; material things trump spiritual realities; security of situation and location trumps security in the Lord; physical pleasure and comfort trumps the satisfaction of the soul; the present trumps eternity.  This inversion of what was meant to be is all around us.  And it is probably the most insidious innate danger to life in a fallen world.

We were never wired to live for the glories of what is seen.  At best, the shadow glories of this world were meant to point us to the one and only glory really worth living for, the glory of the Lord.  There is always a terribly high price to pay for this substitution.  It destroys our relationships, it distorts our culture, it scars people, and ultimately it leads to death.  The sustaining oxygen found in the glory of God cannot be found elsewhere.  When we breathe in the deoxygenated gases of the creation, our lungs end up gasping and our hearts atrophy.  It is not so much that the created things are evil as much as that they were never meant to take the place in our hearts that only God can fill.  Desire for a good thing becomes bad primarily when it becomes the ruling thing.  Creation cannot and will not sustain us.  In our distorted vision, we look at the shadow [the creation] and we see life.  But the shadow has no life of its own and it can give no life.  In the same way, the creation is neither self-starting nor self-sustaining.  It always reflects the glory of the Creator because it is completely dependent on Him for its very existence.

The Creator/creature line is the great divide.  Nothing on this side of the line is comparable to the Creator.  Furthermore, every thing on this side of the great divide depends upon God, who is on the other side, for its very existence and even its ability to continue to exist.  Think about it.  Behind every single powerful thing stands the God of infinite power.  Behind every moment of physical beauty is the God of glorious beauty.  Behind every physical wonder is the God of incredible wonder.  Above every moment of love there is the God who is the source and very definition of love.  Despite all this, our temptation to replace the spiritual glories of the Creator with the physical glories of the creation both greets and grips us every single day.  It remains our constant and inescapable struggle. 

To be continued ...

The Peril of Midlife: Drilling Down to the Nucleus of the Crisis, Part 3

So how do all these things that we have been discussing interplay with each other on the canvas of our lives?  We as people must be understood through the themes that run through the sum total of our experiences.  Usually some unsettling event serves as the "trigger" to set into play the trap that has been set for us, usually by us, in an unconscious way.

There is a way in which we don't live our lives but rather that our lives live us.  We tend to just get carried along by our locations, relationships, situations, responsibilities, opportunities and activities without stopping very long to look, listen and consider.  Huge chunks of our lives can pass by almost unnoticed.  Then we get hit with some tectonic event ... like the Titanic hitting the iceberg.  We suddenly, forcefully have our eyes opened wide.  It can be the loss of a job, a deadly illness for us or someone close to us, the undesired end of a relationship ... many things really ... but what they have in common is they provide a window into our lives that we had not previously looked through.

This triggering event thus opens our eyes and provides us with a new awareness.  We begin to see and feel things that were probably already there, but in the busyness of our lives they received no attention.  Now they are front and center.  We suddenly realize how much time has passed and how much we have failed to accomplish.  We realize our health isn't what it used to be and the realities of aging are much more noticeable.  We suddenly see how certain decisions we may have made along the way have set certain courses for our lives.  And we begin to perceive great differences between our lives and the lives of others around us.

This leads to profound personal interpretations.  The crisis of midlife is primarily about this:  an unexpected event followed by powerful new awareness, and then the resulting crisis is rooted primarily in the way that we interpret the things we are now seeing.  The problem is that as sinners our interpretations tend to be narrow and selective.  Remember that sin not only affects what we do but it also affects what we think and see.  In ways that we often don't even notice, sin reduces all of us to fools.  Scripture says that the way that seems right to man leads to death, and the way that makes no sense is often the way to life and wisdom.  That is why we all need the wise perspectives of God's Word.  Midlife crisis is profoundly theological.  It all hinges on the fundamental ways that we make sense out of our lives.  It all comes down to how our functional belief systems shape the way we respond to what life/God puts on our plates.

Midlife struggles also expose the ruling desires of our hearts.  The interpretations that we bring to events and the new awareness that we receive in midlife do not result from abstract theological truths.  Instead, the functional theology that shapes us as people and that is manifest during this period is rooted in the values, treasures and cravings of our hearts.  Thus, midlife crisis in its most basic form is not so much an event-driven crisis, a crisis of awareness or even a crisis of aging.  Fundamentally, it is more a crisis of the heart!  Midlife exposes what we have really been living for and where we find meaning and purpose.  It has the power to reveal where there are significant gaps between our confessional theology and our functional theology.  And when these things that rule us get taken out of our hands, we tend to become angry, fearful, bitter, and/or discouraged.  At its core, midlife crisis is a crisis of desire.

Lastly, we see so many people make reflexive responses when in the throes of midlife crisis and this is where we get ourselves into so much trouble.  These reflexive responses may seem logical, but in reality, they are only the twisted logic of desire.  We become trapped in the cul-de-sac of the thoughts and motives of our sick hearts.  And our responses to our new awareness will only change to the degree that we are willing to address the underlying issues of our hearts.

These five themes tend to run like cords through the fabric of the typical midlife crisis.  They need to be unpacked and understood biblically, and, in doing so, we will not only come to know ourselves better but also come to know Christ more fully.  It is only in such moments of humble, honest self-examination that we are able to grasp how wide, how deep, how full and how complete is the love of God for us.  It is also here that we can finally begin to understand that Scripture not only lays before us the wonderful promise of eternity, but it also understands the deepest issues we experience before we get there.

The Peril of Midlife: Drilling Down to the Nucleus of the Crisis, Part 2

One of the most fundamental ways that we all make sense of life is by organizing life into categories.  We say God is a Spirit; Janna is both a woman and my wife; Ashley, Alli and Ariel are each girls and my daughters; and Aslan was our dog.  We speak of things as being large or small, important or unimportant, valuable or not of value, healthy or unhealthy, true or false, expensive or cheap.  The lists go on.  We divide things into categories like biological, mechanical, Eastern, Western, artistic, philosophical, emotional, masculine, feminine, cultured or barbaric.  Instinctively, we organize things into little boxes that we carry around in our brains.

Sometimes we are wise enough to realize that our boxes are too few or too small, but often we become overly skilled at squeezing our life story into whatever boxes we happen to be carrying around in our minds at the time.  In so doing, we fail to recognize just how powerful and influential the interpretive function is that we are bringing to the table.  Life will always look like the categories that we bring to it, and what we do will always be determined by the way we have organized our understanding of our own stories.

While this is true, one of the interpretive problems that get us into trouble in midlife is that our typical cultural categories for organizing our lives can be woefully inadequate.  Say we divide the full range of human development into four categories:  child [0-12], youth [13-20], adult [21-65] and elderly [65+].  If you look at these closely, it doesn't take too long to realize their inadequacies.  The spans of child, youth and elderly are relatively brief when compared to category of adult which encompasses 45 years!  Consider the incredible differences between a 21 year old man and the man who is 64 or even a man of 44.  These three people are likely in very different places emotionally, socially, economically, relationally and even spiritually.  To say that these three men are "adults" is to make an observation of such wide generality that it almost means nothing.

This also tends to ignore the fact that people are always involved in some kind of change process.  This is one of the starkest differences between the Creator and the creation is that everything on this side of the line is always in some state of change while God is constant in His unchangeableness.  All that has been created will be different in some way tomorrow.  Thus, anticipating this change and committing to it is a part of a productive life of the believer.  But too often, we get caught up short.  How many times have I been surprised that my kids have changed and matured in some new way?  That my body or mind has again failed me?  That another one of my kids is graduating or getting married?  The list is endless.  But we need better ways of thinking about human life rather than broad age-oriented categories.

Scripture in a very natural way describes people in four fundamental relationships.  The first and most foundational relationship is our relationship to God.  Everything we are and everything we do is shaped by the health and vitality of this relationship.  Consider Adam and Eve in the Garden ... they were quite unified as husband and wife when they consumed the prohibited fruit.  But they were in rebellion to God.  And like every other period of life, midlife powerfully exposes the true condition of our relationship with God.

The second relationship is our relationship to others.  The Bible always speaks of people as being in some kind of community with each other.  Even in His saving grace, God is not just giving spiritual birth to a bunch of isolated saved people, but as Paul told Titus, "a people for His own possession."  We are always someone's child or parent, neighbor or friend, husband or wife.  From Genesis 2 forward, the Bible always looks at people from the vantage point of the communities to which we have been called.  We are never okay, no matter what it may be that that we are achieving and no matter how happy and satisfied we may seem to be, if we are not living properly in the primary relationships in which God has placed us.

The third relationship is our relationships to ourselves.  Now this may seem odd but there are real ways in which we relate to ourselves.  The Psalmist is seen speaking to himself when he writes, "Why are you downcast, O my soul? [42:5].  Think about it.  Is there no voice more influential in your life than your own?  Seriously, who talks to us more than we talk to ourselves?  Most of us have had regular conversations with ourselves today even if we are not even aware of it.  And these conversations help create both our identities and our perceived responsibilities.  Almost everything we do is somehow shaped by who we think we are and what we think we have been called to do.  We all live with some sense of moral responsibility, accurate or misshapen, and we either live up to our responsibilities or try to find some way of getting ourselves off the hook.  The disorientation of midlife exposes our struggle for both identity and responsibility and the weaknesses we have in these areas ... weaknesses that may have existed for a long time but now are laid bare under the stresses of this passage of our lives.


The last relationship is that of us to the rest of creation.  As people we are made in the image of God and are called to interact responsibly with the physical world.  This relationship gets at two very important dimensions of our lives as people:  our lives of labor and how we relate to the world of material things.  We live in a culture that tends to view work as the painful price we have to pay to afford the pleasure that we are actually living for.  We see our physical body and our material possessions as essential for any true happiness and satisfaction.  So we in the West tend to be averse to work and obsessed with things and pleasure.

Scripture, on the other hand, doesn't describe the body or possessions as unimportant but calls us to moral responsibility in both areas.  The Bible also presents work, not as a necessary evil, but as a principal part of God's ordained plan for all of humanity ... since it did exist before the fall.  We are designed to be laborers, and our labor is part of an agenda far greater than the the mere acquisition of of momentary material and physical pleasures.  Again, this is a lifelong struggle that tends to boil over in midlife and they have to do with  our physical bodies, where and how we seek pleasure and how we tend to view the world of material things.

With these thoughts in mind I think we are better able to appreciate the crises that occur so frequently during the midlife years as well as being better able to understand the characteristics of a person in the throes of such a crisis.

The first such common characteristic is a general dissatisfaction with life.  We tend to suddenly look around and not be happy with where we are.  It may or may not be a dissatisfaction with a single particular thing such as our marriages, careers, or just a general sense that our lives seem dull and purposeless.  There may be boredom, restlessness, disillusionment and discontent.  The bottom line is we become unhappy with our stories.

The second characteristic is disorientation.  There are times when each of us loses our way for periods of time ... we get lost in our own stories.  In midlife, this disorientation has to do with our identities and our functions.  During this period of our lives, we tend to learn that many of the things that we have tended to believe about ourselves no longer apply.  Many of our duties get assumed by other people [i.e. in our careers] or just go away [such as with raising children].  When this happens, people tend to experience a loss of identity.  This loss of identity tends to be less philosophical [being able to answer the questions of life] and more functional:  "I thought I knew who I was and what I was supposed to do, but now I am not so sure."

The third common characteristic is discouragement.  At some point we begin to realize that we are losing the expectancy, vibrancy, strength, hopefulness and even the courage of our youth.  The younger we are, the easier it seems to be to hold onto our potentials as possibilities.  But the older we get, the harder this is to continue to do as we see them slipping away.  It can be a crushing realization to wake up to the fact that we long ago put away our satchel of dreams.  And it can be very difficult to face the fact that we are more cynical than we are expectant during our middle years.

Dread.  There, I said it.  Not many people in Western culture look forward to old age.  With the extremely high value that we place on physical beauty and physical youth and with our increasing emphasis on physical health, it is hard to be positive about aging.  When we were young we generally felt invincible.  Now we must watch our fat grams and caloric intake as well as how many carbs we are eating.  All this serves to remind us that our biologic clock is ticking down every day and results in a generalized worry or dread about aging and death.

Disappointment.  Two realizations tend to hit us very powerfully in midlife.  The first is regret.  We assess our lives and find that there were things we had hoped to accomplish that we have never been able to pull off.  This can be spiritual ... a life with much less worship or devotion with our children than perhaps we had planned or far too few date nights with our spouses.  Or more personal like never being able to successfully control my weight.  The list of possibilities is endless.  But we all have our personal regrets.

The second realization has to to with dashed dreams.  We have all entertained our own personal dreams.  Maybe it was to do so well in our careers so that we could retire early [I know for me, that finish line never seems to get any closer year after year even despite working my tail off consistently and it can get discouraging ... but at least I don't think I am losing ground like so many others are].  Maybe it was that we wanted a second home in the mountains or the beach [I would like both but have neither].  Maybe it was going back to school to get that elusive degree and perhaps the chance to do something else [I know I have entertained the idea of getting an MBA off and on for many years].  When we were young, we could still tell ourselves that we still had time to realize our dreams, the older we get, the harder that is to do [and still be able to believe ourselves when we tell it].

Disinterest.  This occurs when we realize that the things we used to find both interesting and satisfying are no longer exciting.  We can find it hard to motivate ourselves to do the things that once took minimal psychological effort to commence.  The can be to our jobs [hard to get up and go to work in the mornings], to our spouses or other relationships that now seem like more work than they are worth from what we are getting out of them, or even our relationship to God [where our devotional life can fade away and our spiritual pursuit becomes joyless].  When this happens it is almost as if we have lost interest in our very own lives.

Distance.   When all or any combination of the characteristics that I have listed above begin to lcongregate in our lives it becomes hard not to withdraw.  We don't want people to pursue us and we don't want them asking us lots of questions ... such as "What is wrong with you?"  We just want to be left alone.  We aren't that comfortable with just how lost we are and we certainly don't want others trying to explain things to us that we ourselves don't understand.

Distraction.  The last of the common characteristics of a midlife struggle is distraction.  When all these things are swirling around inside of us we are in places of real vulnerability to temptation.  All sinners' tendencies are to deal with inner struggles by feeding the outer man.  Some of us may overeat for comfort when we are upset.  Others deal with disappointment by acquiring things that we think will satisfy us.  Others pursue the lusts of the flesh to numb themselves against their discouragement.  It is always tempting to deal with the absence of contentment by pursuing the fleeting, but potentially enslaving, physical pleasures that lurk all around us.  "We are," as Paul Tripp describes, "always in danger when we are functionally exchanging the glory of walking with, trusting and serving God for the shadow glories of the created world."

To be continued ...