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What a great joy to be a grandmother during the last few decades.  Our first grandchild was born in 1994 and both of my parents were still living so enjoyed becoming great-grandparents. (Our last grandchild came in 2005.) When I first became a grandmother, someone blessed me with a sweet t-shirt that read, “God made moms and it was good. God made little girls and it was better. But when God made grandmas, it was awesome!” I agree 100% and it’s true if they are little boys as well since we are blessed with three of each. 

I still have that t-shirt and smile every time I pull it out to wear. It reminds me of the look on my mother’s face when she carried that great-granddaughter down the aisle of her church on her first Christmas Eve. She died before the others were born but if she glimpsed over the portals of heaven her smile just kept growing.

I learned a lot watching my parent’s grandparent our two children. I was not blessed with grandparent memories. One set died before I was born and the other in childhood. I feel that loss and watched all the ways my parents did it so well. Sometimes it was pulling out old games they recalled from childhood like “Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button,” other times it was having an old-fashioned taffy pull, or other games like dominoes. And of course there were treats on hand always and old-fashioned ice-cream churning was tops each summer.

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My seventh decade included seeing our grandchildren begin to graduate from high school one-by-one. Then first granddaughter graduated from college in 2017 and the first grandson in 2019. We were blessed to be at both. Covid messed up the third one for us, but we have several more to go if the Lord allows. 

Seeing them begin careers as a BSN (nursing degree) and MD (residency in psychiatry at the moment) was an unexpected delight given how many grandparents do not see the years of such beginnings. Another beginning came when our oldest grandson got married in January of 2023 and despite my horrific accident just 10 days earlier (https://pamecrement.com/2023/01/16/who-were-they/), God allowed us to be able to attend.

Grandchildren have given me a lot of delights over these decades but beyond their many accomplishments, the greatest joy has been watching each of them make decisions regarding God and faith. The spiritual decisions give each of them a foundation that surpasses their earthly life into eternity and for that I am forever grateful and blessed. Each of them creating his or her own story as a part of God’s great story.

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Along the way as I gained a bit more confidence in writing on my website and included some of my own photographs, I was invited to be part of a blogger group for a Christian publisher and got to read and review new releases introducing me to new authors. What fun! 

Not long after that in one of my devotional times I sensed the Lord begin to nudge me toward writing a book. (I had secretly hoped to write a book since childhood but lacked confidence and direction.) He led me to recall the powerful story of redemption of one of the persons who came to me for help when I counseled in clinical private practice. Not all of our stories have as many surprises and evidence of God’s grace as hers and it could give hope to so many others.

After she had finished counseling during which she gave her life to Christ, she started attending the church where I was on staff. She stopped by my office one day with a heart to begin serving in some area of ministry but none of the usual ones seemed to fit.  I gave her a clean canvas and said, “Bring me a vision.”  Little did I know (nor did she) what God would spark in her in answer to that statement.

Okay, but what did I know about writing a book or publishing one? I began to explore this with other bloggers I had become acquainted with who had done so and talked with the husband who was an author/editor of the woman who designed my website. With those bits and pieces of information I met the woman whose story I wanted to write for a lunch date and asked her about what I felt nudged to do. I shared there was no pressure because it would mean opening up the story before redemption and transformation. How did she feel about that? What would it be like for her adult children who had followed a similar path as she? 

The vision God gave her was a ministry of outreach to women who have been trafficked. She began with handwritten cards with her phone number to hand out after looking at the areas of the city where she lives and surveying the best locations to walk the streets offering grace, love, and hope in the midst of brokenness. But by the time I posed the question, this nonprofit ministry had grown and included mentoring for adolescents, drop-in houses, jail outreach and more. With that in mind I suggested if she felt God was leading in this that the book be self-published and any profits in selling it would go to the ministry.

Her response was “yes” and we began a year long time of retelling her story. We considered one publisher who was quick to point out possible legality issues and would only consider the book if we changed it and made the story into fiction. Neither of us agreed so we trudged on and a friend from my church gave me the name of an attorney who could read the book and offer advice on what we needed to change and what permission we needed when we used real names and other things we needed to consider.

When I was 75 the book was published and we prayed over the copies and asked the Lord to use each copy as He chose.

“To insist on living until we die may be one of life’s greatest virtues. It is easy at any age simply to stop, to be satisfied with what is, to refuse to be more. But when we go on working – at something, for some reason, for someone, or something greater than ourselves – when we go on giving ourselves away right to the very end, we have lived a full life.” 

Joan Chittister

Whatever your age or season of life, are you living it to the fullest?  

Photo by Pam Ecrement

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Much has been written about the biblical principles of sowing and reaping. My understanding of that came from growing up on a farm and seeing how carefully my dad handled the stewardship of the land throughout his lifetime until his death at 84. The winter months were spent planning the crops for spring planting and the rotation of them that would protect the soil. He would also be planning the large garden in a similar fashion as well. By spring the sowing would begin and I recall well his time in the fields doing that. There was also the watchful eye over nutrients and weather that played a significant role in what he would reap. It would be the late summer and early fall when the reaping would begin in both the garden and fields, one crop after another in the season for each. 

I so appreciate the images and understandings of sowing and reaping from living this cycle throughout my childhood and adolescence. They remind me of how applicable they are to how we still sow and reap if we are blessed to enter our seventh decade of life. Some may believe that decade that usually includes retirement is a time to relax on the golf course and indulge ourselves in all the things our careers did not allow for. A careful reading of scripture shows something different including how productive some of the greatest heroes in the Bible were well into this decade and beyond.

We may not be as fast as we once were and find we need more time to replenish our energy, but if we are spared any major illnesses or chronic diseases there are many opportunities available to continue sowing into the legacy we will leave for those who come after us. Doing so will also ensure we stay healthier longer even if we are not doing as much as we did in our 50’s or 60’s.

Photo of my mother at 72

The photo above is my mother, 72, dancing with our son (her only grandson) at his wedding even though she had never danced before. She was in the game until much later in her seventh decade of life. She was still on a prayer chain at the church she had been a part of for nearly all of her life, offering to make meals for someone in grief or recovering from surgery, and using creativity in numerous other areas of her life. These were things that had been within her all along but now they began to flower and bloom in ways that working and raising a family had not allowed. 

“We no longer have to wear the old roles that so defined us for so many years. We can be funny and silly and irresponsible for a change. We can buy new things without asking someone for permission to get them. We can even begin to think differently now. And we do!” 

Joan Chittister

The healthiest senior citizens I know are not tired because they are not engaged but because they are fully engaged not simply waiting to die. For me, that was the door that opened to pursue writing which had been a lifelong passion and I had done briefly in other seasons. It was discovering creativity mixed with life experiences and a bit of wisdom tossed in when I began the website. A new way of sowing had begun and I felt more alive than ever.

“The purpose of a job is to make a living, not to make a life. Making a life is something we’re meant to do beyond the role. This is the part of life in which we work at succeeding at all other dimensions of what it means to be alive.” 

Joan Chittister

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A website and writing on it exposed me to people who had never met me and likely never would. What did I want to share with them? How personal should I risk being? 

At the writers’ boot camp I heard a lot about finding my voice in writing but I was unsure of what that looked like. Words and phrasing of other authors were appealing to me but they were not my voice. That would take me a while to discover and longer than that to risk developing. Would anyone read what I wrote? Would it have any meaning or encouragement for them? Other experienced bloggers had many hundreds of followers and I had less than 20 at the outset. 

It was then in one of my times of devotion that I sensed the Lord reminding me that what He led me to write and publish on any given day might be for only one person. I was not to look at the numbers (tempting as that might be) or compare myself with anyone else. I wasn’t writing this to achieve fame and no money was involved except what I expended. I was aware I was writing because what had been simmering in me for many years could not be ignored, the passion to write was flaming and I needed to take the risk. I had no idea how often each week or month I would do it or for how many years, only that something had been birthed in me and I needed to be about doing it.

Too many stop sowing in the last decades of their lives, never risk living the life that brought new life from within. Each of our stories matter and how it is reborn or born afresh in the last decades of our life on earth is not to be missed or avoided out of fear. Too many times earlier in our lives we gave in to fear and missed out on joy. That is not what the Lord has for us in this season of both sowing and reaping.

But once the website was launched, what then? How would the Lord lead and what else would I discover as I began to step toward 80?

Photo by Pam Ecrement

Photo by Pam Ecrement

In mid-2013 when I sensed during a devotional time that I was to lay down the position I was heavily invested in and loved, I turned the page of my journal and it lay blank before me. There was no indication of what was next as there had been at each previous transition. I had not even been thinking about retirement even though my husband had already retired a few years before. There was nothing that said I needed to retire but I had learned to follow the Lord’s nudges at every other step along the way so without a clear path I shared with key staff the decision and over the coming months I began to plan to let go of the place I knew the Lord had called me to and loved.

I was asked what I planned to do next with most expecting more travel would be involved. I knew that was likely but what would day-to-day look like, how would I spend that time? Beginning to give away some of what had become an extensive library of resources was like saying goodbye to old friends. Many who had met with me in my office knew it was not uncommon for me to swivel in my chair and pull out a book related to whatever we were talking about that offered valuable input. I had always been a lover of books but my shelves at home were already crammed full so there would be no room for all of those in my office.

Little by little some of those resources in my office went to ministry leaders as they related to the areas where they would still be leading. Others went to newer professional counselors I knew and had mentored during the 25 years I had worked and grown in this profession and passion. Some I could not bear to let go as they were now classics and no longer in print so I reduced some of the books on the shelves at home to make room.

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“Life changes. It is the essence of life to change. It is of the spiritual character of life to make demands, to bring new challenges, to goad us into living it.  It is not change that will destroy us. It is the attitude we take to it that will make all the difference. The frame of mind we bring to it gives meaning to the end of one phase of life of course. But more than that, it also determines the spiritual depth with which we start the new phase.” 

Joan Chittister

So with these wise words from Joan Chittister whose book, The Gift of Years, I had read five years earlier, I retired a few months before my seventy-first birthday. It would take several months after I officially stopped working to empty out my office and do all my due diligence with files and referrals to other resources for those I was meeting with. Boxes were carted home with a realization that for all I had given away, there was more I would need to part with.

As we looked ahead our daughter and her family suggested we join them on a vacation to Yellowstone National Park the following year. We had been there previously but the opportunity to see it all again and drive from the Midwest visiting other places we loved was something that excited us. While they would  fly from the mid-Atlanta state where they lived, we would pack the car and head west with stops along the way to see Mt Rushmore and the Badlands again with one additional bonus that was an unexpected step into new territory.

Photo by Pam Ecrement

As we were leaving a grandson’s basketball tournament, I discovered an author I love (Margaret Feinberg) was offering a writers’ boot camp in CO that was slated to be held on the days we would be traveling back home. I had read all of her books and my love of writing as an option peaked my interest. Retirement gifts were ample to cover the cost of that camp so with my husband’s ever encouraging  blessing, I signed up to participate without knowing what to expect. Certainly, I would learn something and get to spend time with a favorite author as well.

What I did not expect was that those coming to the camp were to have put up a website and written at least one blog post before we arrived. How could that be? I was not that tech savvy and thought surely that was something I would learn there. 

I remembered that a couple I knew well through premarital counseling might be able to help in the assignment. The wife was a graphic arts major and her husband was a writer and editor. When I called them, they were more than willing to help so I took my computer to their home and the wife began offering suggestions of how to start and which programs would work the best since her husband already had a website and posted on it routinely. The hardest part that day was determining what the title of the website would be. I tossed one idea after another out but they were either too long or just didn’t excite me. Then in a blink of an eye I suggested “A New Lens” since it fit with my love of photography and that what I hoped to write would be used to try to help readers have a “new lens” to look at what I wrote about from a different perspective. It seemed the perfect fit and within a few minutes I found a favorite photo I had taken at a favorite vacation spot that would be the one used on the home page.

It was a start into uncharted territory. But what would I write about? Hadn’t authors written about everything already? 

Somehow I came up with a first try without much confidence in what was now going to be public. It made me feel vulnerable and exposed and it hadn’t even been critiqued yet by my favorite author? Who was I kidding and what was I doing anyway that summer of 2015?

Photo by Pam Ecrement

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Crossing into the sixth decade of life is often a jolting experience. Your mailbox (both snail mail and email) is flooded with information about your age and retirement even more than when you entered your mid-50’s. For many it points to retirement within a few years and what that can hold. Some have planned on it and move to warmer places to enjoy golf and other warm weather pleasures. Some downsize their homes to be able to travel more easily. Some begin to experience physical challenges unknown to them, and still others plan to retire with no clue what they will do and sometimes a sense of losing who they are without the title, position, and structure of the whole of their adult life.

Some of us are conflicted about letting go of the life of doing and pursuing and getting. Others of us feel the freedom that comes from no longer having the demands of schedules so now we can do those things we never seemed to have enough time to do before. We can take that art class we always wanted to try, grow a larger garden, audit a class at the local community college, or build and finish that project we started and never had time to finish.

If we are fortunate, we begin understanding the truth we may have missed before.

“Because by now, we have learned that the things we amassed to prove to ourselves how valuable, how important, how successful we were, didn’t prove it at all. In fact, they have very little to do with it all. It’s what’s inside of us, not what’s  outside of us that counts. It’s what we learned along the way, what we meant to other people along the way, what we became inside – along the way – that is really who we are.” 

Joan Chittister

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But for some of us this sixth decade opens up a new landscape and role built on all the other roles we have had. And the Lord leads us to yet an unexpected new path instead of hitting the golf course or the retirement community. That would be my course of learning, creating, growing, and building.

By the sixth decade of my life we would be blessed with 3 grandchildren and by the end of it there would be 3 more after grieving a miscarriage in each of our two children’s lives.  That added joys and more travel to see them multiple times a year on as many weekends as we could manage. The adventure of getting to know each one was a discovery as well with different personalities and play choices among what became 3 boys and 3 girls. There were times we were also needed when mishaps, accidents, or surgeries were in the middle of it all as we navigated watching our adult children and supporting them as young parents building careers and families.

There would also be trips to recitals, a swim meet, a national high school basketball tournament,  musicals and fine arts festivals as well as belt tests for karate that we couldn’t miss that added to mileage and memories we cherish with grandchildren as they grew their gifts and talents. Then before we knew it graduations began to pop into the mix.

Photos of our six grands on those trips by Pam Ecrement

My camera went with me everywhere and soon I was the photographer for the sporting events my husband was a part of. This love affair with looking through the lens of a camera to tell a story had begun decades ago when I was writing for that newspaper and was equipped with a Polaroid camera to add to stories I wrote.

Along the way, my husband and I still made vacation travel a priority to what became some of our favorite places such as Banff National Park in Canada, Vermont in peak autumn color, a special resort in the mountains south of Knoxville, TN, the beauty of Ashville and Black Mountain, NC, and the discovery of the charm of Savannah, GA. Each one gave us opportunity for quiet walks and reflections on the family we had raised and this new season of our life together.

Photo by Pam Ecrement

My husband and I were still enjoying good health which not everyone in the sixth decade experiences. I continued my loves of reading, photography, good movies, walks, and lingering conversations over lattes with close friends. I also hired a personal trainer to work on trying to get my “not so young body” into a better place.

“What we are inclined to forget as we are tempted to mourn the end of middle age, the loss of youth, is that they were, in fact, quite uncomfortable times. As young people, we worried about being popular or bright or accepted. In the middle years, we worried about getting it all, having it all, enjoying it all. But there is no doubt about it: whatever we have become at sixty, we are.” 

Joan Chittister

It was this decade that opened the invitation to become a full-time staff member of the church we had been a part of for 8 years. It was not at all what I anticipated. I was doing well in my clinical private practice and finding great satisfaction with that career path. I expected to continue for quite some time in that role as a clinician, but then the church founding pastor asked me to consider this new direction to provide professional clinical counseling as a paid staff member for this large body of believers who could not always afford this service. As I prayed about it and considered this with my husband, I felt the Lord’s nudge to accept.

The hardest part was doing it incrementally over 6 months while I was slowly letting go of my clients in private practice. In retrospect, I would not have agreed to do it that way because by midway through I felt like I was working almost two full-time jobs. 

The discovery in this new path was encouragement to explore and expand other areas of ministry that would improve relational health and train laymen in ministry to become more effective. Some of these areas had a small ministry started but there was the possibility of developing new ones. My background as a teacher as well as a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor and Independent Marriage and Family Therapist on top of typically being a “possibility person” had my mind buzzing with ideas. Beyond this my husband was invited to be an elder of the church and later I would be as well. My love of relationships seemed to be a perfect fit in this diverse body of believers who had known wounds and disappointments by others like me.

This would be the fullest, hardest, and most rewarding season of my life over the 13 years I worked there. It would result in a premarital and marital program with mentoring, grief programs, small groups to address struggles with alcohol, drugs, pornography, past abuse, past abortion and more. It would include major marriage conferences with well-known speakers I had come to know through the American Association of Christian Counselors. Yet, my greatest joy was walking around the church on Sunday mornings greeting people, talking to them, and listening to their stories as well as praying for them. What a privilege this unexpected decade had afforded me.

Life was full indeed during this sixth decade and then as it was coming closer to the next decade, I sensed the Lord nudging me to lay it all down and retire. I loved what I was doing and the people I cared for and was surprised at this leading. I had no plans for what life would be after this, no bucket list waiting for me. Nonetheless, I shared with the staff I loved and served with that at 70 I was going to retire.

What happened then was as unexpected as any other path had been. 

Photo by Pam Ecrement

Photo of and by Pam Ecrement with her sweet hubby

Every season of our life will involve mountains and valleys though in our early adulthood we do not know or expect that will be the case. The mountains and valleys of moving through adolescence and young adulthood can seduce us into a faulty sense that once we move through the rigors of formal education at various levels, develop some friendships, and experience the ups and downs of young love and perhaps marriage that life will smooth out for us. We have still been so busy with sorting out who we are and who we want to be that many of us failed to note much about the lives of those in seasons beyond our own.

If we did much traveling in those years, we began to get a glimpse of life from different climbs. Some had a pattern of visiting a favorite spot with those they loved every year. There was the beach, the camping spot, or hiking on various trails into mountainous terrains. A few of us would step beyond a favorite spot and explore new places time and again giving us a broader sense of the areas we were not so familiar with. 

Photo by Pam Ecrement

My family had few vacations during my childhood but each one was to visit a new place with different kinds of vistas and nearly always some aspect of history. These created a thirst to visit other places I had never seen from my home in the Midwest United States. Those few trips as a child to Washington DC, Niagara Falls, upstate New York, and Florida let me see the diversity of the country of my birth. My husband had even fewer trips and was curious to see more places so from the beginning we were both eager for adventures to new places each year we were able to take a vacation. Despite not a lot of money, we learned to travel without as much expense and gave our children and us times in the areas of New England, the South with its history and beaches, and the prairies and plains on the way west to the great Rocky Mountains. Before our children left home, we had visited 36 different states and a smidgeon of Canada.

We have rich memories of those times with our children laced with a fair amount of humor. Invariably we were getting the children up early and were on the road in our car and later station wagon and they were falling back to sleep for the first few hours. First stop would be a rest area for doughnuts and orange juice before driving farther. There would be new things for the children to keep occupied tucked in boxes for each since that was long before movies, headphones and devices where their eyes were glued to screens. We deliberately asked questions and pointed out historical facts and even had a few pop quizzes over time about what the capital of the state was that we had just entered as one example. There were other questions meant to stir their imaginations when we asked them what they thought it would be like to travel in a Conestoga wagon or prairie schooner and what they would have needed for such a journey. Invariably our daughter would ask how long it would be until we reached our destination for the night and my husband would say something like “a hundred million miles till we get there.”

Photo by Pam Ecrement

These trips exposed us to not only beaches, monuments, mountains, and valleys but also served to help us discover more of the meaning of life beyond our small daily environment. We didn’t know that all those trips, challenges, losses, and disappointments as well as times of joy would give us the gift of contentment in the seasons ahead.

“There is only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning. There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But of far greater comfort to the soul is something greater than happiness or unhappiness, and that is meaning. Because meaning transfigures all. Once what you are doing has meaning for you, it is irrelevant whether you’re happy or unhappy. You are content.” 

Laurens van der Post

We came to be most impacted by the mountains. We could not live there but they gave us a perspective of God and life that nothing else did. It was there we felt the greatness of God, the power of his creation, the wildness of his love, and were reminded of so many things that nourished our souls, minds, and hearts for living in passing through the valleys that are also an inevitable part of living. 

Photo by Pam Ecrement

The mountains challenged in the climbs and on the trails to see things more from God’s point of view. Their fierce wildness of terrain, wildlife, and vegetation stirred our hearts to grow in trust of his provision in all places and things. In the rockiness of the western mountains we loved, we not only saw the rugged terrain and what might look like barren terrain but also the waterfalls both large and small, the lakes sparkling and clear. We began to see little flowers tucked into the rocky trails and places where broken trees had fallen. New life springing up touching the granite with color and life. And we marveled in the miracles of it all. 

Photo by Pam Ecrement

Though we would travel through many places, it would be the mountains that would call us and teach us about the meaning of life to move us forward in the challenges of the valleys. Photos I took would remind us but the imprints on our hearts, minds, and spirits would be the best of all.

We could see his power in crashing waves on a beach and his beauty in the sunrise and sunset there, but it would be different for us to see Him in what might look like barren places of the granite mountains. It helped us see Him in barren places and reminded us of his provision as we moved into each next season of life on the way to now.

Photo by Pam Ecrement