I will be turning 50 in a few weeks’ time, and whatever else that may mean, it definitely means that I am now well into middle age. Now that I’m here, I feel like there were many resources to guide me when I was a young man, and there will be many to guide me as I become an old man, but not nearly so much that pertain to these middle years. Jared Wilson seems to have noticed this as well, and he did something about it by writing Good News for Midlife: Navigating Middle Age with Guts and Grace.
Midlife is a strange season in that we are neither young nor old. We are no longer just starting out, but we are also not yet near the end. While our work is well underway, we have not yet brought it to completion, and though we may see the end on the distant horizon, we are still in the game and still have a lot to offer. In its own way, it is a time that can be embraced or resented, that can be full of victories or full of failures. For some men, these will be the best of years, and for some they will be the worst. Wilson describes the season this way in his introduction:
As men reach middle age, we face unique challenges related to physical and spiritual health, reckoning with our past, and preparing for retirement or the future in general. But while this season of life poses unique challenges in marriage, family, and health—not to mention in our thoughts about legacy, heritage, and “what it’s all about”—midlife also presents exciting opportunities to trust Jesus for personal, marital, and spiritual flourishing.
Wilson has written this book for men who understand there will be new challenges and new blessings in these years and who wish to remain faithful throughout them. It is for men who want guidance as they approach these years and enter them, lest they fail to make them all they could be.
To that end, he divides his book into two broad sections. In the first, he explains how to flourish now. He writes about the necessity of keeping the local church central to a man’s life since “real men are churchmen.” Men need to embrace their position in the life of the church and maintain a full commitment to it.
He writes about marriage in the middle years as children gain their independence and the house grows empty. “The midlife marriage season—whether you’ve got older kids at home or you’re living together in that empty nest—is one that has proven challenging for countless couples. Many husbands and wives spend twenty years or more gradually relating to each other only as dad and mom, and when they’re suddenly given more time together, they don’t have any idea what to do with it. They look at each other and think, Who are you?” In this way, marriage becomes different from what it was, and wise men will learn to adapt to these changes.
Parenting changes too as children no longer need their fathers to function in the ways they did in the little years. “When your children become adults and leave the nest, your role may change even further. You’ve gone from quarterback to coach and now to booster. Boosters wield some influence on the team, but it’s more in the way of support from the background. As many dads of adult children will tell you, they especially feel like an athletic booster in the area of ongoing financial support!”
After covering parenting, Wilson covers work, friendship, and health, all areas that may be different in midlife than in other stages, but each of which is important to a man who is eager to embrace this middle stage of life.
The book’s second part is a trio of chapters that look to the future and to finishing well. Here Wilson discusses legacy, lament, and endurance. Legacy considers the heritage a man wishes to bequeath to his descendants, lament honestly assesses and repents of failures, and endurance is finishing well, even if that involves finishing physically weak. He wraps it up with a series of very practical ways that men can honor the Lord in middle age, and these range from praying like their lives depend on it, to planning date nights, to paying off debt.
Good News for Midlife has all the hallmarks of a Jared Wilson book. It is candid, transparent, and applicable; it is written in a brother-to-brother tone and has dashes of humor scattered throughout. It is deeply dependent upon Scripture and, of course, it is gospel-centered. It’s just the book many men will need to remain faithful and flourish in these crucial middle years of their lives.
