When bad things happen to good people, particularly people who believe in God, a mid-faith crisis erupts. You find yourself questioning God, your beliefs, your track record as a Christian, and just exactly where you are on your spiritual journey. This is the crux of reflections from Lauren F. Winner's new book Still: Notes On A Mid-Faith Crisis. This is not your classic memoir in that it is not written as a chronological narrative, but short chapters with reflections on her spiritual journey after her mother dies and she separates from her husband. One of these events is enough to rock a person's world, two really makes you take a step back and rethink everything. She begins to question her commitment to her faith and the presence of God. She wonders at times if God is hidden and she questions whether she is in fact living her faith or just going through the motions. She wonders where the joyous time following her conversion to Christianity went and will the joyous moments ever return. Here are some of the interesting life lessons I noted in reading about Ms. Winner's "middle" spiritual journey:
1) It oftentimes occurs to Christians encountering a mid-faith crisis that maybe this is happening because they have sinned in some way.
2) It is not God who is absent in a mid-faith crisis, but you who are absent.
3) When change in our life is required, the literati among us turn to reading and books.
4) Every decade we tend to remake ourselves and renew our identity.
5) Sometimes the worst loneliness is not estrangement from the one you love, but the loneliness of the
routine transpiring of days.
6) Evolving through our prayer life as humans can work like this: in preschool you pray about God, rabbits, deer, the tangible, etc.; by the time you are seven years of age you define prayer as asking God for a need; as a middle-schooler you might define prayer as talking to God and asking for forgiveness; and as an adult you might discover that God is the author of your prayers.
7) There is a real question as to whether anxiety can be inherited.
8) One way to overcome anxiety is by taking a break from it for 15 minutes by praying. After the 15 minutes is up, you can always go back to being anxious should you so choose.
9) Oftentimes, our anxiety stems from being left alone in a situation we don't feel able to handle.
10) Busyness can be disorienting; it can be like one of the seven deadly sins. (This is why I do not use twitter),
11) We can become too invested in how we feel about church and God while not invested enough in how we are serving God, church, and our neighbor.
12) In stillness one can find God.
13) Upon confirmation as a Christian, you agree that the stories/beliefs in the Bible are those with which you will forever wrestle.
14) Stories with heroes laud their virtues and stories with saints encountering failure demonstrates God's forgiveness.
15) The journey to God is like walking through a castle. The first couple rooms are basic, ornate enough and as you wind your way to the center of the castle, it becomes more light-filled and awe-inspiring.
Ms. Winner says at the conclusion of this book that she wrote it to make sense of her spiritual life after a crisis. She also studies and teaches at Duke Divinity School so it stands to reason this would be a learning experience she would wish to document. Personally, I liked her book Girl Meets God better than this book, but only because it flows in more of a narrative format whereas the book Still is written as short, sometimes choppy chapters that are reflections on how her spiritual life is changing. It stands to reason that I would agree with Ms. Winner that keeping a journal during major life crisis proves cathartic so I will be immensely happy when a publisher or agent or both discover my memoir involving a family encountering crisis and the
subtle and life-changing lessons learned from our dramatic, yet meaningful year.
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