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 ...
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