Two Halves of Life | Spiritual Cartography E2

Hey friends, it's John Mark, our team of practicing the way is really excited for our upcoming pastor conference happening January 26th through 28th of 2026 here in Los Angeles. The conference has sold out for in-person tickets, but if you are a pastor who still wants to gather with your team or a few friends and explore what formation looks like in your context, we have a watch gathering option for you. Our team can join remotely and watch each session live or on demand. We've also created resources designed to help your team process what you're learning and discern your next steps together. There is a lot riding on our shoulders as leaders, but we don't have to go on this journey alone. Learn more about watch gatherings at practicingtheway.org/pastorconference. Hello and welcome to the John Mark Comen-Titans podcast. My name is Yinka Dawson and I'm your host. Each week we feature teachings by John Mark or other voices in the formation space and it's great to have you with us. We're continuing our special series Spiritual Cotography, Cutter and Floor content from the practice and the waybook, all about navigating the stages and season of spiritual life. In this week's episode, John Mark compacts how understanding the first and second half of life can help us name both the temptations and the invitations of each stage and stay faithful to Jesus in every season. Here's John Mark. Have you ever been in the room for the birth of a child? To witness new life emerge from the womb and receive the gift of its first breath. Have you ever had the chance to watch that child grow up ever so slowly? To see them pass through the awkward stages of learning to crawl and walk and eventually run, of growing into their arms and legs, of trying to get their brain to catch up to their body, every step of the road is a miracle. In the same way that our body is designed to grow through stages, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, our soul goes through stages too. What I'm calling spiritual cartography in this series, developmental psychologists call stage theory, it's the attempt to plot the stages of psychospiritual growth that we experience over our lifetime. It's an attempt to map the journey of apprenticeship to Jesus over the arc of a life in order to plot yourself on that map and better name Jesus warnings and invitations at each step of the journey. As the spiritual writer Ronald Rollheiser put it, "We mature by meeting life just as God and nature designed it, and accepting there the invitations that beckon us ever deeper into the heart of life itself. Maturation is a lifelong journey with different phases, human and spiritual, and it has many setbacks. What can be helpful is to have a grasp of the natural seasons of our lives and how these interface with the vision for Christian discipleship and its particular stages." Now, let me offer you one of the most basic stage theories, which is loosely based on Jesus teaching. The end of John's Gospel, we have a fascinating conversation between Jesus and Peter about the emergent disciples' future. Very truly I tell you, when you were younger, you dressed yourself and went where you wanted. But when you are old, you will stretch out your hands and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go. Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, "Follow me." Notice Jesus divided Peter's life into two very simple stages, when you were young and when you were old. When Jesus framed these stages as being very different, when you were young you dressed yourself and went where you wanted, meaning you felt like you were in charge of your life, the captain of your destiny. There was a sense of forward momentum. It felt like you were going somewhere, but when you are old, someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go, meaning you will feel less in control of your circumstances. Your life arc will follow that of your rabbi downward to the cross. It will require what Henry now called a willingness to be led where you would rather not go. This basic frame, when you were young, when you were old, is the closest thing you get to a stage theory in Jesus' teachings. The psychologist Carl Jung called it the first and second halves of life. That language for the same idea that somewhere in midlife there is a tectonic shift in our spiritual journey. To clarify, this isn't an exclusively Christian paradigm. We all experience this shift, whether we apprentice to Jesus or not. But a basic grasp of it can be enormously helpful to us in our discipleship. To that end, the first half of life. As children, we are generally happy, or what psychologists call pre-neurotic. Life doesn't yet feel like a struggle. We don't feel our shadow, not yet. But all that changes at puberty. Our bodies rocked by a surge of sexual energy, which in the best of Christian theology is far more than our body's desire for an orgasm. It's our soul's desire for communion and contribution. This internal energy source, bursting with power, is designed by God to drive us out of our home and into the world. Before puberty, our home is our safe place. We want to be near our mom or dad, hide behind their leg and public and cuddle them in their bed at night. But after we want to go out on a Friday night, be with our friends and explore the world, we dream of adventure, we want to leave home. And we do. We go off to college or into the workforce or away on our travels. David Brooks calls these the Odyssey years, post high school or college. For the first time, we don't know what's next, and we have more freedom than ever before, which we love, but it also comes with anxiety, which we hate. David Brooks writes, "You're like a stem cell, and your blessing in your curse is you could turn into anything." By this stage, it is vital to have a vision of what life is all about, such as a vision of life as an apprenticeship to Jesus. Otherwise we fall prey to overachievement, careerism, climbing the ladder, chasing money and fame, etc., or underachievement, that new American phenomenon of an entire decade between adolescence and adulthood, that the comedian, Aziz and sorry, just calls brunch. We have five important tasks in this season. Number one, to discover our identity and calling, who we were made to be and what we were made to do. This is vital. We need to follow Jesus' call not just to discipleship in general, but his call on us. Number two, to separate from our parents. Page two of the Bible, "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother." Psychologists call this differentiation, and it's a key task of both emotional and spiritual maturity, to differentiate from our family of origin, to break off the bad, claim the good as our inheritance, lovingly set aside whatever isn't us, see number one, and live into Jesus' vision of human flourishing. Number three, to channel all our pent-up energy, sexual or otherwise, via discipline, into a meaningful life and not squander it on wild living like the prodigal son. Number four, to choose the commitments that will define our life. In David Brook's summary of all the sociological research, there are four basic commitments that make for a flourishing life. Commitments to a vocation, a spouse and/or a family, a community, and a philosophy or faith. All four are essential for happiness. Number five, to organize all our disciplines, relationships, and commitments into a rule of life, a basic life architecture that can hold our soul together on the long journey ahead. For those of you in the first half, where would you plot yourself on the map? Of the five, what ground have you already covered and what is still left for you to traverse? This stage of your life is utterly key. Your lane, the foundation, the second half, will be built upon. Please don't let this intimidate you. Let it enliven your daily life with significance. You're not just writing an essay for class or going to work or planning a wedding or changing diapers. You're laying the groundwork for a life. You're making decisions now that will determine the trajectory of the next half a century. As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, now is your chance to invest for your future, to take the long view. All of this is basically the journey of leaving home to find a home. Some people never leave home, cue the running joke about living in your mother's basement. Others leave home but just kind of wander, afraid to settle down or commit. But most people eventually settle down. They find themselves inside the contours of a life with the spouse and family or a web of relationships, a vocation or at least a steady job, with responsibility, with the sense of what they think life is all about. Segway Midlife Just about when things settle into a nice routine, we enter with the Union scholar James Hollis called the Middle Passage, based on the poet Dante's famous line, "Midway Through Life's Journey I Found Myself in a Dark Wood, and Our Struggle Begins to Change." We hear a lot of noise about the midlife crisis, but for most of us it's not as dramatic as a used Porsche 911 and a gold chain. It's mostly fatigue. We wake up one morning to our alarm, always to our alarm. The kids crying, a to-do list we can't ever conquer, and it hits us like a lead weight. There's been a change in our emotional experience of life. Before, our struggle was to contain and channel all our pent-up energy. Now, it's to manage and maintain it. We've chosen the commitments that have come to define our life, and they are rich and rewarding, but also exhausting. They come with responsibilities, and those responsibilities come with an emotional cost. We're so tired. Tiredness can be a sign of maturity, but in a culture of wellness capitalism, we can feel like we've done something wrong, like our life is bad. Surely life is not meant to be this hard. This is often followed by a nagging sense of disappointment. Is this it? This body? This extra layer around my belly? This less than fulfilling job? This non-Hollywood marriage? These non-famous friends? This non-magazine quality home? This unhealed wound? And we begin to ask larger questions about life. Is this all there is? Go to work? Come home? Make it to the weekend? Go shopping or watch TV? Then rinse and repeat? David Brooks uses the metaphor of two mountains. In the first half of life, we climb the first mountain. Our focus is on our career, or marriage, or family, or upward mobility. But one of two things happens in mid-life. Either we are knocked off the upward path, by failure, or tragedy. Or we reach the summit and realize one, it doesn't satisfy. And two, there's a whole other mountain waiting in the distance. As Thomas Merton once quipped, we spend the first half of our life climbing the ladder of success, only to reach the top and realize it's leaning against the wrong wall. Then we enter the valley, what John Bunyan called the "slow of despond" in the Pilgrim's progress. A semi-depressing, though not always, season of life re-evaluation. Our vision for the future often changes, or at least our values. It's in this liminal space of transition that we often receive the invitation of Jesus to a deeper, different kind of life. Then the second half of life. Many people don't say yes to Jesus and life's invitation to climb the second mountain. For those who do, the journey is no longer about upward mobility, but about inward maturity. As Rollheiser put it, success has little to teach us during the second half of life. It continues to feel good, but now it is often more of an obstacle to maturity than a positive stimulus toward it. We're living by a whole new set of values now, we're more peaceful, more content, but we also live with the ghost of sadness. Now we have regrets, missed opportunities, and wounds that still haven't been fully healed. The key task in midlife is acceptance. In his autobiography, The writer Niko's Kazentakis tells the story of a conversation he had as a young man with an elderly Russian monk named Father Makaryas. Father Makaryas, do you still wrestle with the devil? Not any longer my child, he replied, "I have grown old and he has grown old with me. He doesn't have the strength. I wrestle with God." With God, Kazentakis exclaimed incredulous, "And you hope to win? I hope to lose my child." I think what Father Makaryas meant was, when we're young, we wrestle with the devil, with the fiery energies of sexuality, impassion, and fear. But as we age, and the weight of responsibility begins to take its toll, we find ourselves facing a whole new set of struggles, disappointment, disillusionment, depression, weariness, boredom, resentment, wounding, regret, envy. We wrestle with God, or at least God's appointment over our lives. But if we press through these struggles by practicing acceptance, we come out the other side to a whole new place of freedom more happy than ever before, free of the need for our life to conform to an idealized vision, which means "liberated to love and live with joy and peace." At this point, the struggle is no longer to get our lives together as role-hizer put it, but to give our lives away. St. Teresa of Avala concluded, "When one reaches the highest degree of human maturity, one has only one question left. How can I be helpful?" You have only to meet a few older disciples who are like this, and there are more than a few, who shine with an inner luminescence, who radiate a deep joy even as they gently hold the sadness of life, who have come to the full flowering of human maturity, who are hinting at the early stages of sainted to realize, "Oh, this is what life is all about. Not our career, not the numbers in our bank account, not the fleeting thrill of beauty or all the external accruements of the Western lifestyle, but this, the person we become." Now, there is so much we can learn from stage theory as disciples of Jesus. Let me offer you two things, a warning and an invitation. First, a warning. At each stage, we experience temptations from the three enemies of the soul, the world, the flesh, and the devil, to trip us up and cause us to fall. In the first half, the primary temptation is sexual. Again, not just sex as in the desire for an orgasm, but the more primal desire to experience pleasure with no boundaries. Last could look like the desire to travel, to experiment, to get more than you need, to transgress your limitations. But at a very practical level, once we hip puberty, God designed our body to then get into the gene pool and be fruitful and multiply. But in modern Western culture, unlike our spiritual ancestors, most of us will have to wait a full 10 to 20 or even 30 years before we marry, and it's cruel, and that's only for the 75% of us who do marry. The challenge is to live the long years of sexual waiting as a faithful follower of Jesus. But in the second half of life, the struggle changes. It's not that sexual temptation goes away. Many people have affairs in their 50s, but our primary temptation is one of two options, both of which are essentially a refusal to practice acceptance. The first is what Rollhizer calls the temptation to a second honeymoon. Honeymoons are wonderful, and they serve a vital purpose to get us to commit to something that is long and hard, but a vital importance. And we experience a honeymoon stage with all commitments, not just with marriage, but with friendships, churches, jobs, cities, even ideas. We go through a heavy romantic stage with all of them, and it's invigorating. But once the honeymoon has served its purpose to get us to commit, we need to move on to a deeper kind of love, not built around feeling or desire, but around self-giving sacrifice. But this is a very hard transition to make. It's why there are so many divorces right at the beginning of midlife. It's why so many people walk away from churches, jobs, and relationships they don't like. The base temptation here is to keep chasing the carrot up into the right, to keep chasing after juvenile feelings rather than accept our life and run with perseverance the race marked out for us. The other temptation, which is also a failure to practice acceptance, is to give in to anger. Notice how many people grow bitter as they age. You can see it on their face literally, and the harsh lines etched into their skin that permanently marked their seething resentment at the world. At their worst iterations, they take pleasure only in causing others the same pain they have experienced. In the more mild and pedestrian variations, they leak sarcasm, think of the trope of sitcom parents, criticism, and nitpicking negativity, or they self-medicate by escaping into the distraction of cultural narcotics, the endless TVQ, hours upon hours watching sports, workaholism, alcohol, pot, disappearing into hobbies, etc. They become the bitter old fool. The challenge, as in the first half, is to stay faithful to Jesus. During these long, middle years of our life, when we struggle with exhaustion, disappointment, the itch for a second honeymoon, when the pole to bitterness is like gravity weighing on our soul, this is the call to fidelity, to stay true to our commitments, to Jesus and to others. When we honor our call, real joy will flow into us and through us. Secondly, in invitation. The 4th century Saint Gregory of Nissa once said, "Syn happens whenever we refuse to keep growing." That's the invitation of Jesus at every point on the journey, to keep growing, to keep pressing on farther on the journey. Jesus and the writers of the New Testament offer strong rebukes to those who would stop growing. Jesus says of the servant who buried his one talent in the ground, "You wicked and lazy servant." Paul calls those who don't grow infants, tossed back and forth by the waves and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. The author of Hebrews writes, "By this time you ought to be teachers, but you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God's word all over again. You need milk, not solid food." The author is referring to people who never grew up spiritually or otherwise. Our culture is like a vast conspiracy against growth and maturity. There is money to be made in keeping us chasing the fountain of youth, from Botox treatments and $1,000 face creams to adultery and divorce courts and gold chains under open-faced silk shirts. In the first half, cultural forces attempt to keep us in perpetual adolescence, with sociologists called Peter Pan and Tinkerbell syndrome. Think of Peter Pan, the eternal boy, young, free of responsibility, free of commitment, no family, a love interest, but no committed relationship, a life of play and adventure, no work, never burned out or exhausted by the weight of life. None of that is bad when you're 12, but when you're 20 or 30, that's a whole other story. Or think of Tinkerbell, forever 21, Photoshop beautiful, no stretch marks or body fat, the most popular girl for miles, never tired, just driving all the boys crazy every time she's in the room. Again, that's fine when you're 21, but when you're still chasing that image at 31 or 41, we live in a first half of life culture. Various cultural forces attempt to keep us from ever climbing the second mountain at all. What scripture calls elders are a vanishing species replaced by anti-aging boutiques for the super-rich. The cultural values of the West are first half of life priorities, youthfulness, fashion, self-defined identities, careerism, upward mobility, material acquisition, sexual pleasure, freedom over responsibility, instant gratification over long-term legacy, hustle, over slow down spirituality, friends, over family. Whether you are 18 or 80, the invitation of Jesus is to never stop growing, to resist the culture's many attempts to arrest the maturation process. To the disciple Philip, Jesus simply said, "Come and see." To the unnamed young rich man, who seemed to be fairly mature, Jesus said, "Sell your possessions and give to the poor, then come follow me." Two different disciples at two different stages receive two different invitations, each to a deeper level of surrender. And that's what each stage is about, a deeper surrender. And with it, a greater freedom to be at peace with who you actually are and the life you are in fact living, to breathe in gratitude. One closing word. All this talk about spiritual cartography is helpful, but don't let it pull you out of here and now. A key task for each of us, no matter where you're at on the spiritual journey, is to find the goodness of God in our actual life. Not the life we wish we had or the life we want to have, but this life, this body, this job, this marriage, this singleness, this family, this church, this city, this autobiography, there's goodness from Jesus in all of it. So, save for the moment and just take the next step. The purpose of this series is to help us reflect and where we are in our journey with God, and identify the invitations that God has for our lives. So, let us take some time to do just that. First, as always, let's calm our mind and body with a few deep breaths. Bring your awareness to the nearness of God's presence. And while you're there, take some time to reflect with God on what stage you're in, whether it's the first half, mid-life, or the second half. It might be really obvious to you, but if not, take a moment to ask the Holy Spirit about it. And now with that in mind, let's ask God, Father, what is your invitation to me in this season? Maybe it's a stay faithful to your commitments or to seek healing from bitterness. Maybe it's a take time to discern your identity and calling. Take a moment to ask God what this specific invitation might be for you. I'll leave 30 seconds for that and close with Amen. Amen. Thanks for listening. This podcast is from Practice in the Way. We develop resources to help churches and small groups apprentice in the way of Jesus. Thanks to little thoughts for our show music. We're a crowd-funded nonprofit so everything you make is completely free because it's already been paid for by the circle. Our community are monthly givers. Special thanks today goes to Shannon from Lynchburg, Virginia, Georgia from Clem and Florida, Laura from Portland, Oregon, Kim from Battle Creek, Michigan, and Roger from Irvin, California. Thank you all very much. To join these friends in the circle or learn more about our resources, visit practiceintheway.org. Until next time, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.