MIDDLEHOOD
                                                      ( In the middle of Age)


I'm not sure when I crossed this chronological milestone called middle-age.  It seems to be well removed from the freedom of childhood, the age of discovery that was my 20s and the coming into my own of my 30s.  The middle traditionally connotes being sandwiched by something above and beneath you. Surely we all recognize that we are aging and becoming something, someone, ultimately the person we were meant to be.

For most of us there are external signs of our passages through decades. Our clothing tends to trend with us. Our titles change..some of us recoiling at the first time a kid addresses you as sir. In addition to becoming  Sr. Manager, Chief of this, Director of that, Senior Partner, President or Chairman; you become, Uncle, Godfather and the sweetest of all Daddy. You go from your first car, your first purchased car to mini-van ( NEVER) and perhaps dream car. You transition from a singles apartment to maybe a McMansion with room for your brood, in-laws and friends when they visit.

There are however no territorial markings to say you have officially arrived. Sometimes I feel like I am on a trolley that has a continually shrinking view of Disney World, Universal Studios, my high school, college and the fun destinations of my youth as we continue to what lies ahead. It almost feels forbidden to look back, like Lot's wife, for fear of pointlessly frolicking in the memories of your adolescence and early adulthood.  This trolley is a mixture of the magic school bus and the ferry on the River Styx.  It never reverses but will stop for moments at a time.  I guess it would be stating the obvious to note that there is no steady state here in the land of middle. The advertisements for sports are for the most part as a spectator even though they do feature "senior" Olympics and activities that are not too strenuous.

For the first time, you feel the sandwich.  You surreptitiously become a parent and a caretaker of adults-your kids and your parents. This middle also includes a growing recognition of not only the mortality and growing frailty of the people that brought you into the world, but your own finitude. You want to believe that you still have more than a modicum of the strength, power and physical agility you possessed before the threshold of your transition into middlehood. You are thoroughly convinced that is the case until you play a pickup game of basketball, get coerced into a flag football game or hit the gym with one of your younger colleagues and try to match his activity lift for lift.

And then the next day.......... you are immobile, physically traumatized like Loki after the Hulk smashed him like a rag doll in a dismissive posture of his status as a demigod. The full measure of your status as a middle-aged mortal comes to bare as you gingerly walk in search of your once youthful dignity.  The recovery is gradual, almost mockingly slow so that you are more attentive to your surroundings, almost reflective. It also seemed to be a time to ponder what lies ahead.  Not so much to spoil the beauty of the only eternity we can really process which is the immediacy of now.  But as my journey through middlehood gets me closer to the outskirts of seniorhood, to the extent that the days of my youth start to lose their vividness and fade to black and white, almost archaic, I continue to relish the one sweet spot in this land of in between.

 My relationship with God is bereft of the emerging frailties of my dust-formed body.

 His indwelling Spirit has matured mine to the point that my ability to see His attributes,understand His word,appreciate the splendor of His creation, and recognize His purpose and plan amazes me.

 To see His sovereignty in the lives of people that are marginalized and rejected as I walk through these territories, these hoods, has been the sweetest exchange-His immortality for my brief mortality.   You see, as my eyes require assistance, I see with unfettered clarity through His eyes.  As my body begins to show, as much as I fight it, the evidence of my residence in the middlehood, the influence of His spirit over the past 40 years allows me to face principalities, powers, spiritual wickedness in high places with the fervor of a young David against the giant from Gath known as Goliath.  In my weakness, in my acknowledged limited state, He is made strong.  As the encroachment of my next hood, traditionally filled with rubbing balms, pharmaceuticals and support hosiery, incrementally creeps into my existing space, I honestly don't fret.  As the psalmist said, " yeah though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death"(that is a reality whether you are young or old) I fear not what the future holds because I have been engrafted into the family of the One who holds the future.  Here's to the life in the middle!