After I pass the lane for Appalachian Outhouses, there’s a flashing portable marquee sign about fires up ahead and watch for visible smoke, and then I turn past Turkey Cove Baptist Church and Possum Lane, and a billboard that reads Jesus will set you free from your sins, before I park on the side of a mountain to hear a word from God Almighty.
To live your calling completely unashamed is the most uncommon choice in the world.
I’m about to depart from my forties.
And when you’re about to depart, you want God to part all the noise and come make a holy visitation.
I come ready with a new fountain pen, an old deckle-edged journal and my travel Bible, because the Word always confirms and affirms through the Word and words and why not just travel down the roads that God has put your feet on?
I sit atop the Blue Ridge Mountains, clouds drifting by under my feet, when God comes on the clouds.
I let the Spirit hover over my deeps. I read the Word. I reflect back on my stack of decades. I sit up there on my own mount of transfiguration. I try to listen and take notes.
Life isn’t about finally finding yourself – life is ultimately about letting yourself be formed.
When you’re about halfway through your life, you realize God has never done anything halfway and you’ve got to live wholeheartedly before it’s too late.
To live your calling completely unashamed is the most uncommon choice in the world.
This will take courage, and Christ will take your hand, and this is your one life and you can’t let any fear or shame take it from you now.
Life isn’t about finally finding yourself – life is ultimately about letting yourself be formed.
Surrender to the Spirit’s winds and you win. Bend to what comes and you can gracefully bear it.
This getting older isn’t a disappointment for our younger selves, but rather our younger selves were unformed and had to grow through all these life-appointments to shed the false and the futile, and only now, in becoming older, can we become formed, through all kinds of suffering, into the cruciform fortitude of Christ.
Let your life be formed into the shape of a cross and you resurrect into the fullest life.
Someone had asked me the week before if I’m happier now than when I was struggling mightily with turning 40. I’m a slow learner and I’m still discovering and that’s what I told her:
Move with the Spirit and be formed by Word through the story you’ve been given, & this fluidity & bending the knee in praise is the exercise that expands the soul to hold God for all eternity.
Life has a way of humbling you and tenderizing you and forming you … And the only way to not break is to give up stiffly insisting on the lifestory you wanted – and gratefully surrender to embracing the lifestory you’ve been given.
It’s true: A bruised reed, God will not break – but we break our own selves when we’re stiff-necked and rigid about white-knuckle controlling our lives.
Surrender to the Spirit’s winds and you win. Surrender to gratefulness for what is – and you win a greater joy than whatever you hoped for. Bend to what comes and you can gracefully bear it. Let yourself be formed cruciform and everything in your life transforms. But grow stiff with bitterness and life’s winds will snap you and break your only heart.
I’m here still learning to be fluid, to move with the Spirit and be formed by Word through the story I’ve been given, and this fluidity and bending the knee in praise is the exercise that expands the soul to hold God for all eternity.
Up there in the clouds of the Blue Ridge mountains, I can still see it, when, for my 40th, we had piled all of the kids into the van, and headed east to the ocean and two of our young teen sons had taken off to climb one of the mountains fringing the coast.
I had watched them: They’d ferociously, relentlessly, surged toward the summit – but their descent had been this slow, careful picking down the slope, attentive and intentional, to keep themselves from slipping and falling and crashing all the way down.
Climbing to the top of the mountain is the easier of the two – it’s far harder to come downhill and stay in one piece.
When he’d finally completed the descent, our oldest son had come found me, shaking his head and said words to me on the eve of my 40th, that I am still thinking about now a full decade later:
“Climbing to the top of the mountain is the easier of the two – it’s far harder to come downhill and stay in one piece.”
Descents require more focus than ascents.
This is true and no one can afford not to be intentional now –– and yet it is also true that what maybe matters most in our lives aren’t on a downhill slide but increasing: “Across the world, life satisfaction and emotional stability begin to increase around the age of 55.” Perhaps it’s fair to say that the only thing that really is on the downhill slide after we depart our youth, isn’t the good life, but rather it’s the negative life that starts to decline:
Descents require more focus than ascents.
“A landmark longitudinal study across the adult life span by psychologist Margaret Gatz showed that negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, stress and frustration… actually decrease steadily with age.” One of the possible reasons for this decline of the negative life is fascinating: “Older people remember positive images more often than younger people, who are more likely to remember the negative. Whereas younger adults are devoting resources to other things, older adults are trying to focus more on emotional goals and enhance their well-being,” notes Mara Mather, professor of psychology at USC Dornsife.
There is only so much time now, there is still time now, there is always enough time to focus on what’s good and right and true and beautiful and all that’s saturated with the grace of Love.
The only thing that really is on the downhill slide after we depart our youth, isn’t the good life, but rather it’s the negative life that starts to decline
I refuse to believe it’s too late and I scratch it down in my journal there on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains:
One has been formed into joy who has radically accepted the present moment as a gift, who keeps enjoying the all-encompassing presence of God,
who has belly laughed with fresh-faced, gleeful babies and time-worn women whose faces are mapped with the lines of a glorious life,
who has, day after day, put their hand to the plow and did not turn back from the earthy, hard work of their one life even when it seemed like nothing quite turned out, who has gratefully lived with great generosity, and brave vulnerability, and surrendered cruciformity, whose life was a gift, whose love was a given.
And when I open the Word, it falls to where I’m chronologically at in my reading, the book of Ecclesiastes and the lines:
And I’m smiling at such an apt reading and the timeliness of how God speaks and I try to believe this about time on the top of a mountain, when my eyes fall upon the words in the next chapter:
“The fool sits back and takes it easy,
Sloth isn’t what you think, but at its core – sloth is when we resist God’s daily and steady work of transforming us; sloth is when we refuse God, refuse to surrender to the sacred work of being remade, refuse to die to old habits so we can be made new.
Whatever your age, only the fool sits back and slides flippantly down, but the wise never sit back and take it easy – but take heart and live wholeheartedly because life isn’t a gift you dare squander. Whatever your age:
Sloth is slow suicide by self.
Wasn’t it Josef Pieper, theologian and philosopher, who spoke of sloth as resistance to God and all God purposed for you to be with your one and only life?
Sloth isn’t what you think, but at its core – sloth is when we resist God’s daily and steady work of transforming us; sloth is when we refuse God, refuse to surrender to the sacred work of being remade, refuse to die to old habits so we can be made new.
Sloth is when we refuse to allow God to form us into all the glory He meant for us to be.
Sloth is slow suicide by self, refusing the saving, remaking work of God.
The air is rarefied up here in the mountains and I’m breathing deeply with certainty that there is enough time now for the sacred work of watching sunrises with hands raised in worship, enough time to make the brownies, to walk through the woods, read one more chapter, make the call, move the body, journal the words, give the time, sign up for the course, volunteer the hours, hold the reaching hand, be the gospel, be formed cruciform and transform, change your story and write more love into the next chapter. “There’s an opportune time to do things, a right time for everything on the earth.”
Atop this mountain slope, just to the east, in front of where the sun rises, there’s a flaming butterfly bush, with these long, supple, purple trusses of flowers nodding in the wind.
Sloth is slow suicide by resistance to who you’re meant to be, & you’re meant to swallow down all this grace & all this possibility, & you’re meant to swill down these sacred moments & do what’s hard & holy & makes you more whole.
And for hours, as I sit still on a mountainside listening to God speak, I witness a swirl of Monarch butterflies, and flitting Red-spotted Purple butterflies with their iridescent wings, descend on blooms, ascend and descend again, drinking all the sweet out of all this glory that is.
You get burning bushes at every turn and I memorize this word from God.
Sloth is slow suicide by resistance to who you’re meant to be, and you’re meant to swallow down all this grace and all this possibility, and you’re meant to swill down these sacred moments and do what’s hard and holy and makes you more whole and you’re meant to swig back everything that is forming you cruciform, and today, and right till your very last breath, you get to suck the sweet dripping nectar right out of life.
When I come down off the mountain, past Turkey Cove Baptist and Possum Lane, and just before I turn at the billboard assuring that Jesus saves you from sin, I already can sense it, how that sign won’t be there anymore, the sign about fires up ahead so watch for the visibility of smoke.
Because I’ve seen my sign and can feel how the smoke’s all cleared and there’s this fire burning sure white-hot sure within.
How do you navigate changes and find the way through transitions…. and lean into the life you’ve always dreamed of — and trust that it’s not too late?
How do actually practically find way to still…. to live out a life of interior stillness in the midst of change and whirling storms —and stay centered on what is central to be steadied and strong?
What does it personally look like to form your mind, your days, your life, into the deeply meaningful, cruciform love of Jesus and let God love you in the ways He deems good and best?
What does it powerfully look like to have a new way of life, a new way of being that rests fully in the hesed lovingkind ways of God — especially now?
