On Midlife Crises, Friends, and Finding Your Face

Photo by Denise Metz on Unsplash

Here’s the newsletter: talk to your friends. Check in with them. Really check in with them.

Find out what stories you are telling yourselves.

Look, a lot of the time we need to just get together, catch up on our news, and have some fun. But everyone is carrying baggage, sorting through garbage, and trying to find their own face in the midst of it all. And you can’t find your own face by yourself. We just aren’t made that way. We need to summon it out of each other. We need friends for this.

I have been hesitating to tell myself that I am at midlife. But all the sudden I realized I am probably not going to live to be 96. Holy crap, I am on the other side of the hump now. And I want to tell you something. There is something to the midlife crisis. Except the ones we label as going through it—the ones who leave their spouses and buy flashy sports cars—are doing it wrong. They are often going after more false faces.

Midlife sneaks up on you. It really does. It often coincides with some other crisis: you may be the spouse who was left, work becomes unbearable, or, I don’t know, countless church officers start publicly harassing you, calling ahead of your speaking engagements, and sabotaging your Amazon page. Something shakes you up enough to make you look at your face and see the disillusionment. The hustle. The ways we’ve been trying to perform the goodness that we so want. Without the beauty. The counterfeit currency of it all. And that we aren’t really known. Not even to ourselves.

And if we are doing it right—the whole midlife crises thing—we want a real face.

So we ask the questions. How am I? What brings meaning into my life? What makes me come alive? How am I distinctly good? What really matters to me? Who do I want to spend my time with? What does God think of me? What do I think of God? How well do I love others?

We need friends to talk to this stuff about. It would be great if church was the place we could bring our stories. I open The Hope in Our Scars saying when things go well, church is a place where our stories are drawn out of us and given new light in the reality and beauty of the gospel, and our expectations for church life are transformed beyond what we could have even known to ask for. We find that we are part of a much bigger, overarching story that has us on a dynamic trajectory together. And as our personal stories unfold and weave with the stories of our brothers and sisters in the faith under the metanarrative, we hold them together as a testimony to where we’ve come from, what we’ve been through, and the beauty Christ is inviting us into together through them. In this, we find freedom in belonging to Christ. Freedom to be known, to love, to give, and to sacrifice for one another on our way. Freedom to promote one another’s holiness and goodness. Freedom to share our struggles and pain. Freedom to confess our sin. And freedom to seek beauty together, which helps us to see clearly and reminds us of our trajectory—communion with the triune God and one another.

But it doesn’t happen that way for many of us. It didn’t for me.

And you know what? I’ve learned that a lot of the time people just cannot hold your story. Including yourself. We re-narrate our stories to be bearable. Comfortable. Secure. Fine. To be versions of ourselves and others that we can look at. But Jesus. What a revealer he was. He saw people. Told them their stories. Drew them out of themselves. And stayed in the room.

Wanna hear something crazy? We have some newish neighbors next door. Our homes are close together. They came over after church a couple of weeks ago to give us a bottle of bourbon after my father-in-law died. They knew me better than I thought! But anyway, I didn’t even know they went to church. So I asked them about it, and it turns out they are going to my former OPC church. The one I sought help in when I was going through all that spiritual abuse. I didn’t tell them any of that, but did say that we were members there for a good while and to tell the pastor they are neighbors with the Byrds. She was like, “He must have forgotten. He’s been to our house and didn’t mention you.” The erasure. Like he never even knew me.

Which brings me back to friends. I think pastors are called to be friends. Jesus tells his disciples that he calls them friends because he makes God known to them (John 15:15). And this knowing extends to them. He knows people. He calls them out of themselves before God. It’s why people loved him and hated him. He sees their real faces. And holds up a mirror to show them. Not everyone wants to look.

Sometimes—and by that I mean a lot of the time—it takes half a life or more to go looking for your real face. And that is if you’re lucky. (Now that I’m not a presbyterian, I use the word lucky again, and then I whisper to God that he knows I am referring to his sweet providence.) We need real friends for this. I’ve got some. This weekend, we named the disillusionment in our lives. It’s less scary when you name it. Especially when people stay in the room with you. People who can help you imagine your real self. Which summons it out a little more.

I think that is pastoring. Friendship is pastoring.