Over the weekend, I read an article that I found deeply significant. In it, cultural commentator David Brooks focuses on finding meaning in older life, though I found his reflections relevant to all of us at any age.
He reports that Stanford, Harvard, and Notre Dame are among a number of universities now offering programs intended to help adults in their sixties transition into their next season of life. As he notes, if you’re sixty years old, there’s a 50 percent chance that you’ll live to be ninety. What will you do with what he calls the “Encore Years”?
Brooks assures us that we don’t have to enroll in such year-long programs to benefit from the research they convey. He reports: “People at all income levels derive some of their identity from how they contribute to the world and provide for those they love, and people at all income levels feel a sense of identity, and get thrown back on existential questions, when those roles change or fade away.”
At such a stage, he writes:
People will either achieve generativity—a way of serving others—or sink into stagnation. At an age when you think they’d be old enough to know the answers, they find themselves thrown back into fundamental questions: Who am I? What’s my purpose? What do I really want? Do I matter? (his italics).
Why are such questions so urgent? Brooks explains:
I’m fascinated by these programs because, among other reasons, I’m hoping they can serve as an antidote to the cultural malady that The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson calls workism. This is the modern way of thinking that, he writes, “valorizes work, career, and achievement above all else.” Many Americans, he continues, have come to assume that work can provide everything that humans once got from their religion—meaning, community, self-actualization, a sense of high calling (my italics).
Here we find the key to the issue.
“Their core self, their visible self, and their best self”
God often uses people in their Encore Years to change history:
- Abraham was seventy-five when he left his home to follow God (Genesis 12:4).
- Moses was eighty when he led the children of Israel out of Egypt (Exodus 7:7).
- Caleb was eighty-five when he claimed his part of the Promised Land (Joshua 14:10–12).
- Zechariah and Elizabeth were “advanced in years” when they became the parents of John the Baptist (Luke 1:7).
- Anna was eighty-four when she met the infant Jesus (Luke 2:36–38).
The key is knowing and doing God’s will for our lives in every dimension of our lives. Otherwise, we are subject to the vagaries of personal subjectivity.
To illustrate: Brooks quotes Carl Jung’s observation, “What was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.” He also reports that Harry Davis, a longtime management professor at the University of Chicago, “asks his students to identify their core self, their visible self, and their best self.”
For Jesus, every moment of his life was “true” and not a “lie.” This is because his “visible self” was his “core self,” which was always his “best self.” Now he wants the same to be true for us.
How does this work?
Brooks notes: “Most of us don’t just want simple happiness; we want intensity. We want to feel that sense of existential urgency you get when you are engrossed in some meaningful project, when you know you are doing something important and good.”
Jesus was “engrossed” in the most “meaningful project” of all, the redemption of the entire human race. When our highest purpose is to know him and make him known, we join him in lives of true “intensity” and joy.
“See that there is nothing between Jesus and yourself”
I spent many years as a Christian not understanding what we’re discussing today, and fear that many believers are where I was.
Because I prayed a salvation prayer at the age of fifteen, I knew that I would go to heaven rather than hell when I died. Beyond what our youth minister called our “fire insurance,” I understood that reading the Bible and praying could be beneficial ways to find God’s wisdom and help for the challenges I faced.
In that context, I would have encouraged us to live for Jesus as the “meaningful project” of our lives. What I missed completely was the notion that the living Lord Jesus wants to live through us, that “Christ in you” is the “hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27), that our living Lord is continuing his earthly ministry through us as his “body” in the world (1 Corinthians 12:27).
Accordingly, our “line of service,” as Oswald Chambers put it, is “to see that there is nothing between Jesus and yourself.” This is not so that he can then empower us to serve our purpose, as I used to think, but so that he can then serve his purpose in and through us.
This is a 24/7 lifestyle and a foundational reason Satan tempts committed Christians with so-called “private” sins that seem to have no public consequences. The Enemy knows that the Son of God who defeated him so thoroughly in the first century can do the same in the twenty-first century. He will therefore do whatever he can to impede our intimacy with Jesus. And we must do whatever we must to maintain it.
Would you ask Jesus if there is anything between yourself and him today?
Quote for the day:
“Spirituality is not about competency; it is about intimacy. Spirituality is not about perfection; it is about connection” (Mike Yaconelli).
Denison Forum
