Countdown to 50 - Redemption

Final random ramblings as I approach my 50th birthday tomorrow.

I have arrived at the last hours of the fifth decade of my life. A few hours and change from now it will be B-Day, an arcane observation brought to you as a precursor to this week’s final reflection.

My last word before 50 is actually an encouraging one, about progress and hope. When I review the seasons of my life, I do not find one that did not in some laudable, necessary way build upon, improve upon, learn or veer from its predecessors. I am today a better person than I was in my thirties. I was in that decade a stronger, more reliable cog in God’s human wheel than I was in my twenties, etc.

The advances have not been linear, of course. Just as no summer season is sunny and 85 every day, so have my personal seasons been unpredictable collections of stormy, seasonable, and delightful conditions. But from the convenience of hindsight, I can say I have always been better than before.

In my teens I cultivated the seeds of silliness and sarcasm that have so well served me since. But I was also naive, intensely, sometimes laughably naive, about the real world.

The twenties never roared for me as they did for our nation last century, but in them I stretched enough to open myself to profound educational experiences at Iowa and in seminary, encounters of the mind and heart that effectively coerced the surrender of my naivete while surrounding me with supportive, encouraging friends and mentors, people who picked me up when I fell and, in some cases, still share part of the road with me today.

But the twenties were also home to profound personal crisis, to the naming of the internal brokenness that had accompanied me unchallenged for most of my still-young life.

In my thirties I figured out, finally, who and I was. The answer not only provided the subject of my masters’ thesis (the seminary called it a “final project” or some such thing, but in my forties I learned that “thesis” sounded a hell of a lot more impressive), it also rooted my heart in hope that my life could mean something, a potential I had not authentically owned in previous seasons.

But also in my thirties I ended a marriage, only haltingly implemented the strategies for personal growth discovered the previous decade, and stalled professionally, allowing ministry to be a creative, but far too repetitive exercise. Though the world around me was changing fast, I didn’t. Though I could see the effects of those changes, I did nothing to respond to them. Naivete redivivus, perhaps.

And in the forties? I rediscovered physical exercise, which had been a missing person in my life for ten or more years. I acknowledged, finally, that the church wasn’t in Kansas anymore; it was time for change. I discovered God’s gift of a person, Shari, with whom I now share marriage. And I claimed more than ever before ministry as calling – divine imperative – rather than profession or career.

The decade was also home to the ethics case that prompted the most poisonous challenge to that call. While there is no doubt that the case was the most hurtful, disgusting experience of my life, during its hell I discovered that I was willing to fight for what/who I believed in, that I valued integrity about as much as anything, and that justice sought could suffice in the absence of justice received. In an earlier essay on this blog I confessed the flawed ways in which I handled that case, but it was the desert through which I had to journey in order to be the better person I am today.

Which is not at all to say the “perfect person” I am today. As this decade closes I speak no bon voyage to the haunting professional insecurities that have made frequent appearances on the Express. Since 1997, but more precisely, in the last 5-8 years, I have bounced mercilessly between celebrating and denying God’s call on my life. It’s been quite the struggle, one that, in these forties’ waning hours, I know I am better equipped for than ever before.

So what of the approaching fifties? I haven’t got a clue, except, with history as corroboration, that at the end of them I will believe myself to be a better person than I was on that humid August night in ‘07 when I brought this essay to a close.

May a similar conclusion accompany the end of your life’s next season.

Thanks for sharing this week with me. And if you’ll permit...

Happy birthday, Bill.


Pray with me:
For every moment that became an incident that joined with others to create patterns that produced the seasons I look back upon, in the name of Jesus I say thank you, God.