The Dark Night of the Shed

Our mid-life journey starts with loss. And, for me, what was lost was a passport.

Why is this? Why is it that so many men seem to have it all, and yet feel as though they have nothing? What is behind this question, ‘Is that it?’

these feelings are important. This stuff that we go through is not a blip. It’s more than a bump in the road, after which we go on travelling in the same direction as before. No, these experiences mean something. These feelings of frustration or anger or failure or loss need to be listened to. If we pay attention to them, if we confront them and seek to understand them, we will find out what they really are. They are a call. An invitation to new life.

The feelings men get in mid-life are a call to a deeper and more purposeful life. That life is found in a relationship with God, a relationship we enter into through learning from Jesus.

I’m suggesting that through learning from Jesus and doing the stuff he did, we can find a new purpose and a deeper, richer, more contented life.

It is very easy to create a god. All you do is put something on a pedestal and expect miracles out of it. And our basic problem in mid-life is that this is when we come to realise that our gods have failed us. This

‘My experience is that church becomes a worse and worse place. At first you just love it. You like worship, you like small groups, you like sermons, you like everything. But after a while, you realise that stuff doesn’t really transform your character. You’re receiving a lot of information, but not transformation. And it is the lack of transformation that becomes so dissatisfying at this stage of life. You start to stagnate if you’re not transformed. And when you stagnate, you think, “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” and faith all becomes a bit of a disappointment. God becomes a disappointment, church becomes a disappointment. You’re pushing everything out, because fundamentally you’re disappointed with yourself.’

‘God is always interested in what you haven’t told him yet.’

But I am not my job. That is just the ‘something’ that I do to earn money. It’s a very important something, it matters a lot to me and I really enjoy it, but it could go away and I would still be here.

Humility does not mean thinking that I don’t matter, but recognising that I don’t need to matter, at least only to certain people. Look,

Dallas Willard, ‘If our lives and works are to be of the Kingdom of God we must not have human approval as a primary or even major aim. We must lovingly allow people to think what they will.’

One of the most unusual aspects of Jesus’ teaching was his view of God. In the stories Jesus tells about God, he is presented as a lavishly, foolishly over-generous father, a rather daft shepherd who cares so much about just one sheep that he rushes off and leaves the other ninety-nine, a carelessly imprudent ruler who forgives tens of thousands of pounds of debt, a ruler who trusts his servants with untold riches, and an employer who pays a day’s rate to the least regarded workers who only worked for an hour! There are times when he is stern, of course, but this tends to be when the lavish, risky generosity that he models is not replicated by others. This is a God who loves people but hates it when they don’t pass it on.

If we have a false narrative about God, we will not want to return to him, no matter how much pigswill we have consumed. How we view God affects our ability and our desire to change. It affects how you and I think about ourselves and whether we actually want to go anywhere near his kingdom.

At times he is so let down by me that he becomes the ‘unavailable’ God. I am told he is there, but he won’t take my calls. There is nothing but endless ringing, or an angel putting me on hold.

Each man meets with God in the way that suits him best, and the way which will change him most profoundly.

All of which means that Jesus’ command to ‘Go and make disciples’ does not mean ‘Go and tell people more and more facts about me’, or ‘Go and get people to agree with a load of statements about me’. It means, ‘Go and show people what it is to be like me. Go and make apprentices.’ To be a disciple is to be a trainee Jesus. An apprentice Christ.

As Dallas Willard writes, ‘Our “kingdom” is simply the range of our effective will. Whatever we genuinely have the say over is in our kingdom.’ The kingdom of God is encountered in the Jesus-shaped lives of its citizens.

Solitude and silence are absolutely crucial for surviving and thriving in the second half of life.

But I have come to realise that prayer is not, primarily, about fixing, asking or even getting answers. It’s about meeting God.

‘In fasting we learn how to suffer happily as we feast on God.’

As the Pope wrote, ‘All men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece.’ We all shape the ‘wondrous material’ of our own humanity.

Death and resurrection is the rule of the universe. Seeds fall into the ground, seeds have to fall into the ground. Autumn must be undergone, winter endured, and spring anticipated. They’re all about life.

‘The goal of human life is not death, but resurrection.’