Hot Days, Hot Girlfriends, and The Middle of the Middle of the Middle
It’s Wednesday. Not only is it Wednesday, it is June 15th. It’s the middle of the week of the middle of the month of the middle month of the year.
Today is the middle of the middle of the middle. It’s the middliest of the middle. In my mind, this is significant.
The “feels like” temperature was over 100 degrees this afternoon. The purple basil, once flush with fresh leaf and blooms I had to pinch back every day, is looking a bit wilted and bedraggled. I hear my grandkids outside my office window, bouncing a basketball in our culdesac as The Preacher cheers their attempts and the sun sets.
In the hot, tired middle, we who are in it need retooling, desperately. After all, we have probably experienced sickness, difficulty, even betrayal, and our wide-eyed innocence is as wilted and weak as purple basil in a hundred degrees. I don’t know about you, but I have gotten older and wiser, and I’m just not mature enough anymore to shrug off cynicism. I have to avoid it. I even have to push back on it, everywhere I see it trying to languish my joy.
The tiniest consolations are as big a miracle to me, now, as walking on water. This world is so rife with strife and war and pestilence, that a glass of iced tea with an Alabamian friend, the snaggle-toothed smiles of grandchildren, or field flowers in the scorching sun, all alike are tender miraculous mercies, not to be taken for granted. Noticing something small - granular, even - something centered in the day I am actually in, pulls me back from the abyss of apathy that so many others in their middle seem to have fallen into.
Today has been as hot as the hinges on the gates to hell, but the birds are still singing out there, delighting in the blue hour. Wildflowers thrive, and wildly so, because they’ve become acclimated to the weather that is, not the managed outcomes of greenhouse conditions.
The Preacher picked up some Chinese takeout for our supper tonight, because I had a magazine article deadline. (I can’t feel upset about this, when I’ve waited all my life to be able to say it!). Of course, I went for my fortune cookie, first. It said:
The one who knows enough is enough, will always have enough.
So, on this middle day of the week, in the middle of the month that is the middle of the year, I stop to say to my soul, “It is enough.” Every ordinary day is crammed with glory, springing up even from roots set in parched, hot earth.
And because “I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate”, tomorrow I leave for Birmingham, Alabama.
Van Gogh said that, and I partly believe it. Because something akin to “fate” crossed the paths of The Preacher and I, with these friends - Mark and Jennifer, pastors of Life of Faith Church in Birmingham. It all began with them being “friends of a friend”, but now I don’t know which friend is the friend of a friend, them, or the couple who introduced us. I reckon we are all each others dear ones, now.
And because I hate travel, and never engage it without a good reason, you could say I’m an adventurer by fate, not choice. Whether it’s Italy, Nashville, France, or Birmingham - it’s all the same to me. I’d rather stay home, but the love of God compels me.
As does the laughter of a good, southern preacher’s wife.
Me, thinking about 18-wheelers on the interstate
I’ll be back, come Monday.
Have a beautiful, middle evening. And then a beautiful weekend, this sweet middle-month.
Midlife As "The Valley Between"
“Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision! For the day of the LORD is near in the valley of decision.”
Theologically, this Joel 3 passage speaks of the judgement of God. Here are the words of Barnes’ commentary on these verses:
“For the Day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision - Their gathering against God shall be a token of His coming to judge them. They come to fulfill their own ends; but His shall be fulfilled on them. They are left to bring about their own doom…”
So I might be contemplating, here, the deep similarity between midlife and the Joel 3: 14 conundrum…
Today, I heard a lecture by social scientist and NYT bestselling author Arthur Brooks. It was pointed out that our satisfaction - or lack thereof - with our relationships at age 50 is a singularly clear and concise predetermining factor of our quality of life at age 80.
Let’s look again at the commentary on Joel 3:14 - “Their gathering against God is (actually) a token of His coming to judge them…” (parenthesis mine)
IOW, their perspective - which in this valley place could not be reverse engineered - portended their own actual destiny. These in the valley thought that their dissatisfaction, by the sheer numbers of them that were “in agreement”, meant that they must be right. But from God’s vantage point, those who gathered in that valley of decision for the wrong reasons were foretelling their own doom.
In the light of Joel 3 and the results of Dr. Brooks’ research on quality of life IN midlife and into old age…
…some of us better be availing ourselves of the Mighty Gift of Repentance. (To repent simply means to “choose to think completely differently.”)
We absolutely cannot reverse engineer the sense of satisfaction we have/had in our relationships at any age, but particularly not at age 50-55. It was what it was, or it is what it is. We cannot pretend it away…not with God. Here is where repentance is as big a refreshing to our spirit as adding a new deck to the back of our home was to our outdoor “long table family-and-friends dinners”. (That deck was game changing. A joy-maker. It increased our ability to practice hospitality in every way. Our outdoor life is FUN, now. But it was hard, hard work…because we did it all ourselves. By choice. From tear-down, to re-build. What a metaphor is there, on the process of repentance, and the joy it brings when we get through it!)
Repentance is a gift.
We can choose to repent of our own dissatisfaction with our friends, church, spouse, or job. We can choose another perspective, and decide to (dare I say it?) love what is ours.
an image of a (sold) original depicting feminine youth and midlife - and the mentoring relationship
In natural terms, your happiness when you are old depends on doing (or having done) the right thing in the midlife “valley of decision” .
MY message is this: If you didn’t get it right, you still have time to fix it. But it will be hard work, it will take time, a few letters or phone calls, or face-to-face over coffee. It may take the act of circling way back, and sincerely apologizing.
None of those actions earn God’s favor. Of course not. What they do earn, however, is some all-important emotional resiliency, flexibility, and joy.
By choosing to “return to first love”, by activating the SHEER MIRACULOUS GIFT of being able to go back in time (through repentance) and “fix it” where you failed to love, means you get to flex and strengthen the very emotional muscles that you must have to thrive in your elder years.
(an image from a sketch tutorial found in my online class “The Women of Advent”)
Wherever I am unhappy now, foretells my quality of life in twenty years. However I find myself in my “valley of decision” will be the position God lets me keep - unless I change my mind. Unless I tear down and rebuild.
Wherever I am not loving what is mine to love right now, in the middle, in the valley of decision, is predicting the very areas where, in my old age, I will have either “real relationships” or “deal relationships” (based on “you do this for me, I do that for you”).
Your original design is to “go from strength TO strength” (which is also the title of Harvard lecturer and author Dr. Arthur Brooks’ new book). But to have that kind of lifestyle all the way into old age depends on the mysterious paradox of sovereign grace meeting your own initiative to do the work. Do the work of change.
May the Holy Spirit bring this home to every heart. Mine, above all.