Photo by Pam Ecrement

None of us do life in a vacuum. There are people, relationships, and connections that begin to shape who we will become from the moment we are born. It’s certainly the family we are born into but even those who touch us in the moments in the hospital after our arrival give us a little sense of our new world outside of the safe place inside our mother. But it will be a few seasons until our tendency to be egocentric begins to diminish. Perhaps it won’t happen until early adulthood or even beyond for some.

It wasn’t always that way. There was a time 75+ years ago when people tended to need to accept responsibility and leadership earlier when we were more of an agrarian culture in less industrialized areas. When that shifted there were pluses but we also lost something. Men of my dad’s era (born in 1910) were used to working long hours beside their parents to provide for what was needed and became good stewards of those things as well. They also lived in multigenerational homes and communities so they reaped the benefits of those generations above them as they often spent more time with them than they did with just peers.

In the transitions of my life along the way I was blessed to have relationships from several seasons above me as well as peers. Later there were some younger than I. Those all enriched my life. Along the way, how they lived their lives, managed their responsibilities, and modeled relationships were an invaluable gift. I recall them now with great respect and affection as I did even when I was much younger and their investment in me made no sense. Their age and wisdom saw things I missed until I approached their ages.

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I recall so well my sophomore high school English teacher. She was one of a group of what would be called “old maid teachers” who recognized my family life exposed me to a limited scope of many things. She knew then I liked to write and she encouraged and believed in me. She and several other older unmarried teachers knew I loved music and musical theater and had no chance to experience it so they sometimes invited me to join them at a local summer theater for their productions. What a gift they were to a farm girl whose insecurities were quick to result in her never risking something for herself in almost any area.

Being a young bride of a Marine Corps officer wasn’t easy.  There were more than a few wives whose husbands were the same rank, but also senior officers’ wives to show us how to cope with the challenges of being a military spouse (especially during their deployments). One of them became a very special person for me. When my husband got orders to a lengthy overseas duty coinciding with our first pregnancy, she called me and said she knew her husband would soon receive similar orders and she would be returning to the county I would be living in then and connect with me. And not many months later she did.

This woman had five children and had been through so much more than I and she invited me to her home often where she treated me as though I were an equal. She also blessed me with her exceptional gifting as a pianist and it would be she who would point us to the best piano teacher in the area when the baby I was carrying was a young boy wanting to learn to play the piano. When her husband retired and they lived just 2 hours away, we would go to visit and later walked beside them when her husband developed cancer that ultimately took his life. It was she who exposed us to the significance of the bar mitzvah of one of her grandsons. We would also travel to Arlington National Cemetery for her husband’s burial with full military honors. When she joined him there some years later, it was a significant loss of one of the older women of my life.

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She was not the only one. Another precious gentle hearted Mennonite woman encouraged me in more ways than I could count over her “friendship tea” at her kitchen table where she shared her faith and loved me when I was not nearly as mature as I should have been. It was she whom I visited when she was in a senior living facility after her husband died and visited her just a few weeks before she died. She spoke then of so many things I wanted to remember but the most significant were those she spoke when I asked her what she was sensing from the Lord as she neared the end and she said, “I won’t be disappointed.” I was blessed to be able to share a few words about her at her funeral and I miss her still.

I began to have younger women in my life by my mid-fifties so the tapestry of different seasons became a rich part of my life I still cherish. What has been hard for me is to now have only two women in my life who are older than I. How did I become the older woman to most others? When did that happen as I was busy living life?

Little by little all along the way I was learning that relationships were the key and it shaped many of my choices and values along the way.

“At its core, life is not about things, it is about relationships. It is the hands that we go on holding in our hearts at the end that define the kind of life we have led. Our relationships determine the quality of life as we have known it. They show us the face of God on Earth. They are, too, what batter our hearts into feelings of life.” 

Joan Chittister

Little wonder when you look at the places the Lord led me to work and serve that relationships were the passion of my heart. They were not to be collected like trophies but rather to be seen as gifts to care for, grow with, learn from, and develop as a better human being. 

The position I wrote about on a church staff even had “relationship development” in the title I was given. 

How easy we forget!! God set that model for us when He created us and wanted a relationship with us. It was always about that and it is what I think He wants us to understand and then be more like Him.

Photo by Pam Ecrement

Photo by Pam Ecrement

As I was transitioning from one new role to another and seeing how God used one to prepare me for moving closer to the next, so many things were happening at the same time that it was impossible to recognize how each and all of them together were also transforming me. New learning, new skills, new challenges, and new opportunities were happening while other parts of my life were also changing in dramatic ways.

If you have been following recent posts, you know I left you in the middle of moving from a good tenured teaching position to the uncertainty of working in a Christian Clinical Counseling private practice. During those same years our children were growing up, involved in various activities, moving from elementary school to high school, and then starting college. My parenting role was shifting with each of their transitions as well as our move to a new church community, and an awareness the parents of my husband and I were both getting older. This last part was not really as clear since our lives were so caught up with everything else the way it so often happens in our middle age season.

That middle season of our lives often means a near collision with our own pathway happening while husband, children, parents, and friends are moving in their own directions as the world around us changes as well with disasters of all types that grab our attention day by day leaving us grappling with all that is occurring. 

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Many celebratory things are a part of this season and so it was for us as well. There were graduations for children with friends, grandparents, aunts, and uncles to laud accomplishments. Children moved on to college discovering their own paths. In our case this time would end with college graduation of first one and three years later another and with it the end of them living at home or near us as dreams and new jobs took them to states hundreds of miles away and then brought them back again for deaths of great grandparents and others dear to them and us.

Before we knew it there were weddings on the horizon to plan for and the excitement of these weddings happening on the college campus both had graduated from and were rich with special memories. Yet this time of joy was tinged with losses as well as their first grandparent and our first parent died. A transition in the middle of one transition left us with little time to reflect as my husband and I took on new roles helping our aging parents while we enjoyed adding a daughter and later a son through marriage to our family tree.

Life was happening at such a pace with so many shifts there was no time to reflect or consider changes going on within us personally. Week by week brought new decisions and untrod paths while we grabbed another cup of coffee for a boost of energy hoping things would slowdown and wishing some things were not changing as time was slipping through our fingers.

I sat in the office of my private practice everyday meeting hour after hour with those seeking help with their own transitions and I leaned more heavily on the beliefs and faith that had carried me this far. Only with these foundational companions could I move into new roles where there had been no courses to give me the new skill sets, energy, mental and emotional bandwidth for this jam-packed season. Time to be quiet with the Lord each morning was more than ever the lifeblood of my day beyond something I enjoyed and wanted to do. Journaling in letters to the Lord poured out page after page as I learned to not only share more candidly with Him but listen more carefully for those things I sensed from Him that would sustain me for the day so I could be available for however He wanted to use me. And as the journal was filled, I learned to dip back through the pages and be reminded of God’s faithfulness in the days that flew by.

Within one 12-month period we would experience the college graduation of our oldest child, the death of my husband’s brother, the wedding of our oldest child, the death of our first parent, our 25^th anniversary, and the 50^th anniversary of my parents. It was also a season where we began to say goodbye to friends and peers as they moved or passed away. Many of you have had years like that or are having one now. When we are younger, we don’t envision life will hand us multiple challenges and changes in the most significant areas of our lives as it does, but would we have understood or even listened if someone had told us that back then?

Joyful moments still happen in the middle of deep losses and sorrow. Life is like that, but we didn’t know that when we were younger.

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We knew the generation we had birthed was growing up and starting their own legacy and that our parents were getting older. We spent more time lingering over a family dinner asking them questions and listening to their stories but never asking them what it was like to be them on the inside as they were aging. My dad had been healthy up through and beyond his retirement at 70 while my mother six years younger dealt with various health issues and with the ever-increasing challenges of my aging younger brother and his mental, emotional, and physical disabilities and often called me for advice. We knew they were aging and yet watched them still travel on road trips to visit our children (their only grandchildren) and explode with joy when our first grandchild (their first great grandchild) was born. 

I saw them still looking toward the future of more great grandchildren as my mother gave a handmade crocheted angel ornament to this new hope for the next generation. I did not know then that she planned for more of those blessings or that she had more ornaments tucked in a shoebox on the shelf in her bedroom closet labeled “future great grandchildren.”  That would be a surprise I wouldn’t discover until her death.

Losing a parent is something you cannot imagine or prepare for. They have been with you for all of your memory so to consider life without them is unthinkable no matter how old you are when they die or how old they are. My dad at 84 just a few months before we celebrated our grandchild’s first birthday became ill with pneumonia and was gone within five and a half weeks. During those weeks when he was hospitalized, my mother was having health issues and also hospitalized leaving the challenges that brought including taking care of my brother while my husband and I needed to continue to try to work. But even that was not the end of that hard time because three months to the day my mother died at 79. They just missed their 56^th anniversary but were able to have celebrated our youngest child’s wedding the autumn before this.

Life doesn’t stop when death comes to one part of our lives. During those months I was invited and felt led to accept a position on our church staff made up of a culture diverse from my own and was just getting into counseling there as well as heading, developing, and supervising new ministries I created. Now I would add handling the estate of my parents and guardianship of my brother. Little wonder my early fifties came and went without much notice, but that would come.

Photo by Pam Ecrement

Photo by Pam Ecrement

As I look out the window or step outside, little by little, bit by bit, the leaves are showing off their autumn finery. It doesn’t happen all at once in our part of the country so when it begins, it is barely noticeable. In our lawn, we know it will be our dogwood first whose leaves will start to tinge red, locust and maples come along next, and last the stately oaks. Each makes its entry onto the stage to show off its own shade and hue of color. Each also drops its leaves at a different time.

Autumn is my favorite time of year as we enjoy the bluest of skies often and the varying temperatures that tend to be not too hot and not too cold, not saturated with humidity, and beyond the busier seasons of readying the house, lawn, garden, and deck for the summer season or winter. 

It is also the season when I met the man I would marry and fell in love with and the season of my birth (October). I love the colored leaves and their crunch under my feet when I am outdoors and the smell of good soup simmering on the stove or a warm apple pie coming out of the oven since it is peak apple season where I live.

Getting older doesn’t happen all at once either. It happens little by little so that we barely notice how quickly time is passing except on special occasions where we get reminded of the year by that event. We discover it is different for each of us as we approach the last quarter of our lives. All we were before and how we responded to those things impact how each of us enters this season.

Photo by Pam Ecrement

Harder still to fathom is to be getting older while still seeming inside to be the same person. Each decade and season has its own opportunities if we are willing to see them. Now we have the time to reflect and consider who we are inside instead of defining ourselves by the public face of what we do.

Therein can be a conundrum.

“Of course I am all the experiences I have ever been, on one level. But on another level, I am only what people see when they look at me now. Finally, I am only what I have prepared myself to be beyond what I did.” 

Joan Chittister

Those who have known us the longest have likely a much broader understanding of all that makes us up versus simply who people see us as at this moment. They may recall when we married, became parents, bought our first home, became grandparents, walked through the aging of our own parents and more. Those we met later on the path have only a partial view of us and what has brought us to this place and season. 

I have had many roles and different experiences before now. I was a Marine Corps officer’s wife, a housewife and mother who stayed at home enjoying that role until our youngest was halfway though elementary school. I was someone who loved writing and wrote articles for our monthly church newsletter then that led to working as a correspondent for a newspaper in the next county for three years and gave me options to use a camera to help tell the stories I wrote. Both were things I loved but were not what my education had taught me to do.

Photo by Pam Ecrement

Next came active local ministry roles in leading various women’s ministry programs for another three years that gave me a chance to grow in my faith and how to reach across denominational lines to bring the body of Christ as women closer together. A very different path followed when my local school district where I had done student teaching asked me to help with a remedial reading program that fit well with the ages of our children and kept me at home without a lot of prep demands for another several years. Then one day I was asked by the superintendent to take the position of a junior high special education class. Even though I had majored in elementary and special education, this was not a position I had planned for my future and yet it seemed like an open door of what became a pattern in my life.

The pattern I speak of was how throughout my life I was asked to take on a role or job or position of one kind or another rather than seeking or applying for it. It seemed that the Lord maybe knew the path He desired me to take and left to my own devices I might muck it all up. 

The special education position was anything but easy, but I cared a lot about these students and taught them for 13 years while doing various ministry things like National Marriage Encounter with my husband and lay counseling in our local church at that time. That combination of things clarified that my love of relational things and people were at the core of me and led me (after my husband) to enter graduate school to become a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor and Independent Marriage and Family Therapist in mid-life and leave a tenured teaching position to enter a Christian private practice.

Photo by Pam Ecrement

I was never someone who would call myself a courageous person so each of these transitions challenged me with fears about my ability, competence, endurance, and more. Some thought I was foolish to be leaving a secure teaching position to become part of a private practice where I took an immediate pay cut and lost great less expensive benefits. But part of getting older bit by bit is how we face the fears that can confront us when we step out of one place we know into a new one.

“Fear tempts us to believe life it over – rather than simply changing. A blessing of fear in these years is that it invites us to become the fullness of ourselves.” 

Joan Chittister

I would never have guessed I would go to graduate school and certainly not in mid-life nearing closer to fifty. But something nudged me forward in that arena despite my shaky knees and sense of being not quite as capable as I needed to be. It took longer doing it part-time (5 years) while teaching full-time and still being a wife and parent, but I faced the fear and discovered more about myself than I would have otherwise.

I pursued new things, became a learner again, and felt excitement about stepping once again into a new beginning. Facing the fear gave place to experiencing joy, discovering more of God’s purpose and plans for what gifts He had placed in me. 

Bit by bit God had used everything I experienced before now into a pattern I could never have guessed when I was younger. And I had no idea where this new path would lead me next on my way to the new now.

How we adapt to change and the choices we make and how we respond to them make all the difference. And I could never have guessed what He would have in store next.

Photo by Pam Ecrement