Lost(?) in the wilderness of American male mid-life
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my doctor diagnosing me with mild anxiety and depression…and being 30 pounds overweight.
That didn’t take me by surprise. None of my pants fit and my shirts strain to cover my, ahem, dad bod. I know myself well enough to know that I haven’t been…myself. For a while now, the light in my world has gone sad, like the last sunsets of summer.
For the people I love, I don’t want to stay in this place, but…it’s not a bad place. I’ve read the Bible too many times to miss that people who pursue God must wander in a wilderness. There is no other way.
And where I am now is nothing if not the loneliest wilderness of my life.
In terms that American men are likely to understand: I’m having a mid-life crisis. It’s that time in an American man’s life when he knows his plans are not going to work out. He sees the time growing short. He starts to have regrets for his big mistakes and missed opportunities. He’s not ever going to be the man he dreamed he would be when he was a boy. The world changes and he has more trouble keeping up with it. He starts to attend more funerals of people he thought would always be there for him. He feels the first tickle of death breathing down his own neck.
And, through it all, he tries to put on a brave face for everyone else. He tries to act like it doesn’t bother him. In public, he cracks a joke, shrugs, and tries to act like everything is as it has always been.
But when he’s alone…
Alone is a place he can barely stand to be, most of all in the darkness and the stillness. All alone in that place, all he has is the truth looming over him.
He stares into his own abyss.
I think the pressure is somewhat greater for a Christian man (like me). A Christian is supposed to be happy always. So on top of the crisis of mid-life, the Christian might add guilt and shame for feeling afraid, lost, pessimistic. I mean, if he’s a good Christian, he laughs at mortality. Right?
I said this is not a bad place to be and I meant it.
In the Bible, the wilderness is where people who pursue God find out if the pursuit is real. The people of God cannot know God until they meet God in the wilderness, where their survival depends on that meeting. We cannot know God until we first know God in the lonely, terrible, wild places that seem to have no way out. Faith and hope–real faith and hope–are born in wilderness wandering.
It’s not so much that we find out what we are made of in the wilderness; it’s that we find out if God is real, what God’s intentions are toward us, and whether God has a character that we can trust with our very lives.
This is the biblical pattern. This is the Way.
So I write this from the wilderness. I have no map, no plan, no idea how to get out. I know that I don’t have it in me to blaze my own trail. I know that I don’t have it in me to master and overcome nature–most of all my own nature (which is the most treacherous force I know).
So I must be right where God wants me to be. This has to be the place–the male mid-life wilderness–where God does God’s best work for, on, and with men like me. Here I must learn to trust not in the energy, optimism, and vast resources of youth, but on God who is the fountain of youth, eternal life. Here I learn to be happy and hopeful, but without the things that American culture says are necessary to happiness and hope (perfect health and youth being among them).
The wilderness is a hard place to be, but not a bad place. For those who want to meet God, the true God and not the God of make believe, the wilderness is the only place to be.
Grace and peace.