One Year From Sixty
I came home late yesterday evening, with three brown paper bags from Trader Joe’s riding shotgun. There was organic chicken, sea salt caramels, rosemary sourdough pizza crust (for my new Birthday Outdoor Pizza Oven), and always some sort of flower. It this case, it was paper whites peeking out like friendly green passengers.
The sky above Knoxville had been turning all afternoon, and by the time I left Trader Joe’s, I was driving home under a full-on mackerel sky. The western horizon was glowing with textured pinks and pearl-grays, luminous and rippled, like God had taken a silver brush and dragged it across the heavens.
There’s a particular hour in December when the world feels like it has pause written all over it. Christmas lights start flickering through neighborhood windows, and every home looks like it’s preparing room for celebration, even on an ordinary Sunday.
(Harvest Church, all lit up by Daniel Ritchey of TN Exterior Cleaning Services
I turned the heat up against the chill and ordered Siri to play me some Nat King Cole. His velvet voice has a way of easing into the corners of the ‘Stang convertible. No one does Christmas like Nat. In that moment, with paper white buds perfuming the air and the mackerel sky still shimmering ahead of me, I felt it: gratitude so big it had to be shared with Someone.
I’m fifty-nine now. Sixty is close enough to greet as a friend rather than a stranger. It feels less like a finish line and more like the front door of a new house that I’ve been building with every prayer, every meal shared, every book written and painting completed, every tear and belly laugh and long obedience in the same direction. Sixty doesn’t frighten me; it summons me.
This year ahead feels like the porch light of the fourth quarter. It shines bright, steady, welcoming. I carry a kind of resolve that was not present in my thirties or forties. Back then I was actually still learning the real Gospel; now I feel like I’m anchoring, consecrating, and preparing. Not slowing down, but sinking roots into the truth that abundance happens in the heart before it ever happens in the studio, speaking schedule, or bank account.
As Nat crooned from the speakers, I realized I was driving under a sky that was, in fact, a prophecy. A mackerel sky is an atmosphere in motion, textured with transition. It always portends change.
I felt a calm presence of God fill that cobalt blue convertible like a fragrance fills a sanctuary. Not loud, not cinematic, not emotional for emotion’s sake. Just presence. Just the gentle “is-ness” of a God who has watched over me, and caused me to become every version of myself, so far.
It’s funny how holy an ordinary moment can become: the drive home under a glowing sky, the bags of groceries on the seat, my hands on the wheel, hair catching the last pink light of the day. Nothing special, except that everything was special. The kind of moment that teaches you, again, that joy has never been about the big stuff.
It has nothing to do with sentiment, nostalgia, or drama. Joy has always been about simple gratitude, and an even simpler receiving.
I thought about the year ahead…the one year between fifty-nine and sixty. A threshold year. A year for strengthening the inner gaze, the kind of gaze that sees God in skies and grocery receipts and flowers. A year for practicing painting and writing the way a violinist practices scales. A year for deciding that the final quarter of life is not the diminishing of the flame but its deepening.
Later, at home, I lit a candle and unpacked my bags. The sourdough scented the room. The paper whites, tucked outside into the greenery around the fire table on my front porch made the whole thing look like an outdoor room in a Scandinavian magazine. The Preacher called to me from the other room, and I could hear the rustling of ice in his glass. Nat was still singing in my head, as if he’d followed me inside with all his timeless memory.
And it struck me yet again: the goodness of God is shockingly ordinary, if we have eyes to see it.
My life has been full of mountaintops, ministry miracles, creative highs, deep sorrows, long stretches of waiting, and days when direction came like a gust of wind across the lake where I go to think.
But lately, God meets me right here: in a sporty convertible under a mackerel sky, underlining a sense of His goodness with a pink and gray glow.
One year from sixty, I feel more at home in my own soul than ever before. Not because I’ve solved everything or healed everything, but because the presence of God is not a rare visitor. He is the steady whisper in the car on the way home from Trader Joe’s. He is the feeling that my ordinary life is drenched in meaning. He is the resolve that rises up in me when I think about the fourth quarter…not to retire from a sense of wonder but to help shepherd many more hearts safely to the very edges of it!
I used to think getting older was about a narrowing world. Now I know it’s about a widening perspective. It is the way the sky widens when clouds rearrange themselves into waves. Wisdom makes room. Gratitude makes even winter air warmer.
Hear me: Long faithfulness makes everything more beautiful and more real.
Tonight, I am grateful for the fifty-nine years behind me and the radiant invitation of sixty ahead of me. I am grateful for Nat King Cole’s warm voice keeping me company like an old friend. I am grateful for cliche flowers in the passenger seat, for bread, for home, for a husband who laughs even more easily now that the years have softened us both. I am grateful for the sky that decided to preach a sermon before supper.
And most of all, I am grateful that God likes to ride with me in that blue convertible Mustang.
Fourth quarter is a place of inheritance. A place where gratitude wisely drives decisions.
