The Gift of Middle Age: Enjoy Your Lot. - Trevin Wax

From thegospelcoalition.org

The Gift of Middle Age: Enjoy Your Lot. - Trevin Wax

The Gift of Middle Age: Enjoy Your Lot. - Trevin Wax

I am 44 years old today—a birthday that sounds older than it feels. Whatever this number signifies, there’s no denying I now dwell squarely in the realm of “middle age.”

“The harvest will be different now in your midlife,” says the poet David Whyte in his Midlife and the Great Unknown. As each year goes by, I sense the trajectory of life shifting, like a rocket that has reached altitude and now begins the gradual arc toward its destination. The open-ended future of my 20s is behind me. There are more limits now. All those early choices—where to work, where to worship, where to live, how to raise kids, what kind of ministry best suits my gifts—have solidified into patterns.

It’s like standing at the edge of the ocean, your feet sinking deeper into the sand with each passing wave. The longer you remain, the more the sand covers you—first your toes, then your ankles—until movement becomes more difficult. You’re not stuck, but you’re no longer so free to dash in any direction.

The Lot You’ve Been Given

Here’s where the gift of midlife appears—if we have eyes to see it not as limitation but as grace. The gift of midlife is the opportunity to acknowledge your lot.

There’s a lot to be said about your lot in life. As Bobby Jamieson explains in his excellent overview of Ecclesiastes, Everything Is Never Enough,

A lot is something you are assigned and stuck with, regardless of whether you find it sufficient or think you deserve more. You have no say over its scope. . . . Your life is enclosed by limits you do not set.

So much of life is beyond our control. You didn’t choose your family of origin, your generation, your height, your sex. When you reached adulthood, you couldn’t foresee all the tragedies and challenges that would change you and your spouse. You couldn’t predict everything your kids would need as they matured. Even now, you can’t control the timing for your dream job to open up. You can’t know when a temporary move might become permanent. You can’t anticipate the various health challenges just over the horizon.

In your 20s, all you can see are wide-open fields. By your 40s, the lot lines are clearer. And this is where the midlife crisis often sets in—when wanderlust tempts us to chafe against those limits, to pretend we’re starting all over again, to succumb to the sadness of closed doors and lost opportunities. But wisdom invites us to receive those limits as part of God’s kindness.

Again, Jamieson:

Accepting your lot is the beginning of your responsibility for it, not the end. Like a plot of land, every person’s lot calls for cultivation. . . . Receiving your lot rightly teaches you to care for the lot you have, not lust for one you don’t. . . . And your lot bears within itself the potential to yield joy: joy in the work, joy in its fruits, and joy in discovering the goodness and wholeness that come from adapting to your limits rather than trying, godlike, to bend the world to your will.

There’s a place for ambition, of course—for pursuing excellence, for stewarding your gifts in a way that leaves a mark. But there’s also a holy contentment that comes from leaving any kind of mark without insisting the world take notice.

When Books & Culture shut down, longtime editor John Wilson described the magazine not with grand declarations but with humble acknowledgment that the initiative had been “a small good thing.” No inflated legacy. Just this: “It’s something worth doing and we should be glad that we can do it.” A small good thing.

Rejoice in the Now

As I look back over my life to this point, and peer into the fog of the future, I’m asking for the grace of contentment—learning to say, with the psalmist, “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places” (Ps. 16:6, CSB). Even when I stand near the edges, tempted by wistful thoughts of what might have been or what still could be, I trust that the Lord hasn’t drawn these lines haphazardly.

In youth, the temptation is to live only for the future. In old age, to dwell only in the past. In midlife, we’re tugged toward both extremes—nostalgia on one end, restlessness on the other. The task for the Christian is to resist either pull and to anchor oneself in God’s goodness in the present.

The lines of your lot are part of his wise and loving providence. “A contented Christian,” wrote Thomas Watson, “being sweetly captivated under the authority of the Word, desires to be wholly at God’s disposal and is willing to live in that sphere and climate where God has set him.”

This isn’t settling. It’s settling in—a deep, joyful embrace of “the sphere and climate” where God has put us. And enjoyment isn’t optional; it’s commanded. Life is good because life is a gift. As Jamieson puts it, “The Creator is constantly flinging gifts at you faster than you can catch them.” Even if we’d have preferred the lines to fall elsewhere, he offers a simple way to embrace your lot:

Be present to the present’s presents. Present your full self fully to what the present presents you, and you will receive its full helping of enjoyment. Enjoyment depends on the ability, even the discipline, to be fully attentive to the goodness on offer.

Whatever stage you’re in—young, middle-aged, or old—the application is the same. “The only time you can ever enjoy is now, and in every now God gives you much to enjoy.” Rejoice in the Lord. And give thanks." from the article: The Gift of Middle Age: Enjoy Your Lot. - Trevin Wax

#extraordinarygod