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 ...
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