Think of viewing your life as theater, an ongoing collection of dramatic works in which you are playing the leading role.

Your lines are unmemorized, delivered spontaneously with each day’s performance. There are myriad scene and set changes, some played indoors, others outside in bright sunlight or beneath a starry sky. At times the stage is filled with actors coming and going, some with whom you are acquainted, others you are not; some shouting, pushing, shoving, others standing silent in the background, all with greater or lessor parts to play, exciting, mundane, humorous, tragic.

IT IS YOUR STORY, presented in three major acts.

Act One (birth to 30somethings) is a period of exploration in which you prepare and position yourself to understand, enter into and engage in the culture and community that is your new world.

Act Two (30-60somethings) is a season of employment and empowerment during which you build a life out of your unique skills, gifts, and callings, thereby breathing fresh ideas, energy and purpose into the culture, community and commerce of your day.

Act Three (60somethings-plus) is a full-circle era of listening to the hopes and dreams of the young, interpreting the future with lessons from your past and present, inspiring with fresh hope and encouragement as the generations following you construct their own stories and seek to transform their own new world.

MODERN CULTURE                                                                                           focuses on our journey from childhood through midlife (the first two-thirds), while failing to inspire, explore and powerfully engage in the deeper and fuller life yearned for once we reach life’s ‘Third Age.’ Yet no one reads a book or watches a movie or goes to live theatre hoping the best part of the story will happen in the first two acts and the third will be the least entertaining and inspiring of all. We observe the first acts in anticipation of a climactic, thoughtful, inspiring, happy, stirring, transforming finale!

So welcome in this autumn season, this “third act.” Invite your friends to join us. It’s my favorite time of the year, the most colorful time of mature idealism and fresh “Perspective.” If you are thirty-something and reading this, it applies not only to your parents or grandparents, it applies to you as well. “Elderhood is the only demographic that all of us—if we are lucky—shift into someday.”[1] What does it mean to belong in a place we have never been before? To listen to each other’s stories about how we got here? To develop new friendships? To dream new dreams for yourself and those who follow after you?

If you feel you are drifting without calling or purpose, then get out of the boat and let’s walk on the water. Embrace the adventure. Experience the wonder of living with Jesus in a new season and a new place where we all have a story to share and something to learn from one another. The world and the church needs your wisdom now more than ever. Welcome to an elder’s Perspective, “Living, Learning and Leading in Life’s Third Age.”

May Jesus keep us close.

 

 

[1] Chip Conley, Wisdom @ Work, Currency New York, 2018