Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. | Philippians 4:6–7
This Sunday, I began the sermon by talking about New Year’s resolutions and what they tell us about how we view ourselves. We looked at 3 aspects of this:
- We measure ourselves by what we accomplish – what we do.
- We imagine that we are always getting better.
- We know things should be different.
The third one – we know things should be different – is a byproduct of being human. Since we are created in the image of God, we are given an inherent sense that there is more to the world than what we currently experience. We see this in Ecclesiastes 3:11, where it says:
He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
The reason why we struggle with contentment is that we have been given a piece of eternity; this reminds us that something is missing. God has done this so that we long for Him; this is a grace that does not allow us to become comfortable in a life that is less than what it was created to be. It also has some potential dangers. A lot of our existential angst comes from the fact that we can sense that something is wrong and we can’t do anything about it. Rather than turn to God, we look everywhere else for an answer. Which leads me to the title of this post.
As a man ‘over the hill,’ I am ripe for what has become a common time of life transition known as: a midlife crisis. There are a lot of reasons given for why people between the ages of 40-60 tend to have a period of intense identity crisis; many are situational: kids moving out, aging parents, and the reality that retirement is still a long way off. While all of these are challenges, none of them rise to the level of crisis. What makes all of this so crushing are the two things mentioned above: we measure ourselves by what we do and we imagine that things are always getting better.
When you are young, you don’t think about much more than the moment. As you become an adult, the world opens up and there is an idealism that comes flooding in with it. Through our 20s and 30s, we tend to work hard at moving toward our lofty goals. The accomplishments that we measure ourselves by is not only where we are, but where we are going.
As human beings move into middle age a few things change.
First, there is a reality that you are not going to do all that you believed that you could. Time feels shorter and you have to sacrifice some of the plans that you had for your life. You have to deal with what your life has become, which is usually different from what you imagined.
Second, your body begins to break down. You don’t recover at the same rate that you used to. Eyesight begins to slide. Mental recall gets a step slower. None of these are debilitating (hopefully), but they signal that you are going in a different direction. In certain parts of life, you have reached your peak and are going to be getting progressively worse.
Looking forward becomes much more difficult, because it means that you can no longer rest on your ability or the idea of future excellence. If your hope is in yourself, this is absolutely crushing. It goes against everything that your life is built on, so it is going to take a crisis to reorder. This is good news if the foundation that you have been resting on is unable to support eternity. It may take a crisis to get you to turn from what is false to what is true. While it feels like giving something up, it is actually the opposite. As CS Lewis put it:
We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
Rather than continuing in the wrong direction many of us have chosen, midlife crisis (and every other crisis) gives us the chance to let go and to connect our hope to Christ. If our whole life is for His glory, then there is nothing that aging can take from us. Life is just a series of changing opportunities to worship Him. This is how Paul Tripp describes it in his book, Lost in the Middle, on this exact topic:
God’s purpose in controlling the details of your life (the exact length of it and the locations where you live) is so that at any moment in the middle of your unfolding story, you can reach out and touch him, because his rule makes him very near to every one of us. What each of us really needs in our finite and faltering humanness is not so much the success of our plans, but God himself.
As I have walked with many people through the struggle of coming to grips with their own inability – I have gotten to see the moment when they realized that their failures do not define them. Even more, these weaknesses bring us face to face with what we truly need, and the fact that it is Jesus who provides it gladly. You don’t have to wait until you hit the wall to turn to Him; plus it is a lot less painful!