When you start anything important in life, whether it’s getting a degree, getting married, having a child, starting a business, or even becoming a follower of Jesus, it always seems to start with great fanfare.
But the middle about kills you.
You decide to go to college or get your Ph.D. with lots of excitement, but no one is cheering you on as you grind it out late into the night.
You get engaged to the person of your dreams. You post pictures of the ring, change your FB status, have a few wedding showers and then comes the big day with lots of friends, family, and fanfare. You look the best you probably ever will and the party you throw makes everyone feel like it’s 1999. But the further you get away from that amazing day it can start to feel like it’s all downhill.
You find out you’re going to be a parent. Your parents rejoice, your friends throw you a baby shower complete with a cute cake and games with diapers and pudding. You dream about how your child will cure cancer and bring about world peace. But then they get to middle school and you think what happened to my child?
You start a business and everyone says you will be the next Zuckerberg or Burt’s Bees. They stand behind you when the ribbon is cut and the photo is taken. They ask you if that third row in your minivan folds down because you are going to need that space to take all the Benjamins rolling in to the bank. Okay, maybe they don’t really say that…but they “Like” your Facebook page. Then you get to the middle and suddenly you stop shooting for the Forbes richest list, you just hope you can retire after putting your kids through college.
You start taking the deeper things of life more seriously, maybe because some of the other things didn’t turn out the way you thought, or because you realized the emptiness of materialism. Great fanfare was made when you accepted the message of Jesus, you were even baptized, but now a few years removed you still find yourself faced with doubts, uncertainty, and even confusion about your faith.
I think it’s easy to become disillusioned in the middle because we don’t realize how hard and how long the middle is. Because we underestimate the length and the difficulty of the middle, many dreams die there. The middle is hard, long, and even lonely. The middle will make or break your dreams.
Don’t fool yourself that you can bypass the middle, jump over it, or become one of the exceptions to the middle–you won’t. Even if your beginning starts off as a rocket ride, it will eventually peak or plateau and you’ll have to retool and refuel to go the next stage of the journey.
You know you are in the middle when you start thinking: I can’t see either shore line. I can’t see the one I left or the one I’m heading to. It feels like you aren’t moving, the landscape doesn’t seem to change, and you start to feel hopeless. You will drown if you don’t keep going.
I’ve seen it happen with dreams. People leave college with great dreams to change the world and get bogged down in the middle.
I’ve seen it in marriages. They forgot they married a partner not a counselor, not a savior, not a completer. They just married a flawed man or an imperfect woman. They get bogged down and disillusioned and start thinking, “I’m still young enough to start over.”
We even have a phrase for this messy middle when everything reaches a boiling point…a mid-life crisis. Right in the middle we have a crisis, a crisis of identity, a crisis of purpose, a crisis of meaning. We panic not being able to quite remember where we came from or where we are heading and then we do stupid stuff like quitting the things that matter most. The things we will need most to finish the middle.
When you get to any middle don’t panic, don’t do something stupid, just keep going. Don’t make a U-turn back to where you came from, you’ll have lost everything you just spent the last 15 years working for. Remember this too shall pass. Everyone goes through the middle. If you need help, ask for it.
I find myself repeating this to myself when I’m stuck in the middle and it keeps me grounded:
A mature person lives by their commitments and an immature person lives by their feelings.
If you let your life be guided by your feelings you’ll always cash in too soon. Ask anyone who has done something great about the middle before the greatness and you’ll see them glaze over as they think back to the times they were rowing and didn’t feel like they were getting anywhere.
Our church is in “a middle” right now of a building campaign. I keep repeating this message over and over again to myself.
Question: What middle are you in right now? Share your answer on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
So let’s not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up. -Galatians 6:9
