Sermon: Mid Life Crisis

PL 8 – Recreating Relationships (Mid Life Crisis) Cynthia O’Brien
Hebrews 12:28-13:6 October 30, 2005
Isaiah 55:1-9 Reformation Sunday

ISA 55:1 "Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters;
and you who have no money, come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.
Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.

Give ear and come to me; hear me, that your soul may live.
ISA 55:6 Seek the LORD while he may be found; call on him while he is near.


Hebrews 12:28-13:6

HEB 12:28 Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, 29 for our "God is a consuming fire."

HEB 13:1 Keep on loving each other as brothers. 2 Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it. 3 Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.

HEB 13:4 Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral. 5 Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said,

"Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you."

HEB 13:6 So we say with confidence,
"The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?"


What is mid life?

Don Marquis said it is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.
When you are too young to get Social Security and too old to get another job
Ogden Nash said it’s when you’re sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn’t for you.
Bennett Cerf said it is when your old classmates are so gray and bald and wrinkled that they don’t recognize you.
Sidney Brody said it’s when you are warned to slow down – not by a policeman, but by your doctor.
When you want to see how long your car will last instead of how fast it will go.

Norm Wright, Understanding the Man in Your Life, chapter 9
“Middle age is when you have lived half of his probable lifespan.
It is a state of mind.

Men sense the passage of time and may have a change of values and a change in his view of life. This is a time when men come face to face with fulfilled and unfulfilled dreams, achievements, goals and relationships. There is a transition in thinking, from “if I die” to “when I die.” Many men look at their lives and think of the things they had hoped for and how little they feel they have acccomplished.

We often make a big deal of turning 40 but underneath the fun and celebration may be another set of feelings. What if I made the wrong decisions? What do I really want for myself? Am I satisfied? Can I be satisfied? What if I work for all this and don’t live to enjoy it? Is this all there is to life? Many men feel these words from Dante’s Inferno:
In the middle of the journey of our life,
I came to myself in a dark wood,
Where the right way was lost.

They are one foot in youth and the other in maturity.

In my favorite Shakespeare play, Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice is asked if she will ever marry, and her uncle says,

LEONATO
You may light on a husband that hath no beard.
BEATRICE
What should I do with him? dress him in my appareland make him my waiting-gentlewoman? He that hath abeard is more than a youth, and he that hath nobeard is less than a man: and he that is more thana youth is not for me, and he that is less than aman, I am not for him…

This can be the prime of life or the time of despair. This is the time when men discover that nothing they do can prevent old age. They see their parents die, their body changing and younger people moving ahead of them and taking over.

How do they react? Many resist. The resistance can take many forms – avoidance and denial, or moving ahead in life with blinders on. Others pursue what they feel they are losing or have never had. The big four: Power, sex, status, money. But the ultimate emptiness of the big four can make him despair even more. Accumulating more money, dominating more people, climbing higher at work and seducing younger women do not satisfy, but they are a common pattern.

Story – from the book Clergy Couples in Crisis. A young pastor and his wife came to a new church of about 70 members. Soon a family left the church, then another. When the third family left, they were not only missed but now the church budget was in trouble. The pastor began to think, “What if I didn’t have this wife? Maybe she’s the problem. What would it be like to be married to someone else?” It sounds terrible, but can you see how people will sometimes place blame on their spouse for their troubles?

Several of us in the church attended a workshop this weekend called “Laugh Your Way to A Better Marriage” with Mark Gungor. He’s very insightful and very opinionated and gave us a lot to think about.

Mark says that one problem we have is believing that there is only one right person to marry. Not just a good person, not just a suitable person, but The One and Only Right Person. You know, everyone wants to find “their soul mate.” The church has perpetuated this by saying “God has that one special person for you.” The problem with this, besides that it’s not biblical, is twofold. One, it hurts young people preparing for marriage. Many couples today are together for years without getting married because they are just not sure they have found “the right person.”

This can also hurt you in midlife, if you begin to wonder whether you married the wrong person. Mark said that people come to him and say, “My marriage isn’t going well. Maybe it wasn’t God’s will for me to marry her.” Mark said “Did you say I do? If you said I do, then it was God’s will.” It’s not nearly as much about who you married as about what you do with your marriage. That’s probably true more often than not.

It is so easy, especially in mid life, to focus on the lacks and negatives of your marriage.

There’s a joke – kind of a sad joke -- about two guys. One says, “I’m through with my marriage.”The friend is stunned. "Why? What happened, you two seem so happy together.""Well" he said, "ever since we got married, my wife has tried to change me. She got me to stop drinking, smoking, running around at all hours of the night and more. She taught me how to dress well, enjoy the fine arts, gourmet cooking, classical music and how to invest in the stock market.""Are you bitter because she spent so much time trying to change you." "Nah, I'm not bitter. Now that I'm so improved, she just isn't good enough for me."

No wonder a man can so easily be tempted by another woman. He forgets the positive things about his own marriage, and with the new woman he sees nothing but positive. This is a delusion. It’s not only wrong, it’s ultimately going to hurt him.

When I was 39 I got the idea that I should plan my midlife crisis – instead of being caught off guard and potentially doing something destructive, I would have a positive life transition. That’s when I got this (toy car), but nothing else happened. It isn’t something you can plan.

The positive transition happened for me when we started planning for my sabbatical. Every pastor in our presbytery is supposed to take a sabbatical after every seven years in a church – When we started planning it, that’s when I started redefining what I wanted from life and what it meant for me to be fully and completely “me,” and how I was going to seek God and what I wanted to be for my husband and my children and whether I was ever going to clean out the garage.

The crisis of midlife is a crisis of values, defining and redefining values.

But it doesn’t have to be a crisis. Everyone experiences some type of midlife transition, but not all experience a crisis. Many times it can be avoided by dealing with the changes. And we can survive the crisis and move ahead. Here is where the help is.

ISA 55:6 Seek the LORD while he may be found; call on him while he is near.

HEB 13:1 Keep on loving each other HEB 13:4 Marriage should be honored by all,
5 Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have
As long as we are pursuing the things that don’t satisfy, we will never be content.

Isaiah wrote
Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear and come to me; hear me, that your soul may live.

God knows when you are disillusioned. God knows what your dreams are. God knows you are struggling. That’s why God invites you to find answers that satisfy.
because God has said,
"Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you."

Where can you find the God who will never leave you? Here in the community of faith. In a conversation with another person here. Let another person listen to your struggles. Ask someone to show you hope from the Bible. And in the silence of your own home, in the quiet, in the dark, say a prayer, any prayer at all, to God, and God will never leave you.
HEB 13:6 So we say with confidence, "The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid.