The Three-Quarter Life Crisis

“How old is the person?” I asked. My friend was describing a “clergy killer” in his congregation. This person did not simply oppose his initiatives but seemed intent on chasing him out of town. He responded that the person was in their mid- to upper 70s. I sighed and responded: “This isn’t about you or the church. The person is going through their three-quarter life crisis.” He paused and asked curiously, “What does that mean?” I admitted it was a neologism, something I’ve come up with to describe what I continue to observe as a pastor.

Most are familiar with the term “midlife” crisis, the time of discontent when a person wonders if they have climbed the wrong ladder. Some may also be familiar with the term “quarter-life” crisis, where young people get overwhelmed needing to decide which ladder to climb. In my ministry, I perceive another stage of life crisis. This is what I want to call the three-quarter life crisis, a season of grief, dislocation, and potentially transformation that happens to most people in their mid- to late 70s.

For many people, their 50s are a time of peak responsibility. They are caring for aging parents; they often support adult children with everything from reduced (or free!) rent to subsidized cell phone plans well beyond high school or even college. At work, they finally have short titles — you know, the kind that tells people the buck stops here.

By their mid 60s, most people are settled into a different time period, a time when work has become optional. They get to be consultants or work part-time in a low stress environment at some store they always liked but that wouldn’t pay enough. They likely no longer need to care for parents, and their kids finally have launched. They can focus on spoiling grandchildren rather than negotiating the complexities of raising adult children. During this time, people take on tremendous leadership in churches, in politics, and in volunteer organizations.

But something starts to happen to folks by their mid 70s. Health begins to consume more energy and dictates an increasing number of decisions. If a couple is married, almost certainly one of the two has at least some chronic condition (the phrase we all grew to love, “underlying conditions”). Driving at night becomes a burden, and the energy to serve on committees wanes. Over the course of one’s life, how many times does a person want to serve on a committee assigned the task of updating the bylaws?

More poignantly, many in this cohort, especially as they approach 80, start to lose friends, family, and even spouses to death. If people remained in the town they grew up in or moved to a continuing care community, they may average a funeral per month.

This age cohort likely begins experiencing a deep shift in people’s approach to them. People stop asking them to work or volunteer in leadership capacities. People stop asking them for their opinion about the latest town council or school board issue. People stop asking them for their vote or voice on the changes that should happen at church or other arenas of life. This is the stage of life where one begins to feel rather dislocated, even powerless, within institutions that just a few years back one was leading.

This is the three-quarter life crisis. No one gives you a ladder to climb anymore. In fact, they take ladders away from you because they don’t want you to get hurt.

This article isn’t about bashing or feeling sorry for this three-quarter cohort. Rather, it is about justification (isn’t that what all Mockingbird articles are about?). Our whole lives we are tempted into self-justification, to excuse our actions as understandable, necessary, and even virtuous. Self-justification inevitably graduates beyond saying we made the right decision about X, Y or Z, and eventually, we seek to justify our whole life by pointing to our own achievements, relationships, good works, and status. This barely works when we live in the most productive and generative years of our lives, when we look forward to an infinite tomorrow for righting wrongs and self-improvement. But what happens when we can’t do all the glorious good works we used to? Or when we feel our status in the community has been downgraded because people view us as too old?

When you observe someone in this three-quarter time of life, you are likely observing someone who has to redefine themselves from someone who was valued for their productivity to someone who is valued for their presence; from someone who gave care to someone who receives care; from someone who raised loved ones to someone who buries loved ones. These hard transitions bring up immense questions of self-worth. Furthermore, many in this cohort are wrestling with grief, wrestling intensely with the question of whether Jesus is actually the one who justifies the ungodly.

As a pastor, I preach again and again that we are justified by grace alone apart from our works. Christ justifies us — makes us righteous — simply out of sheer grace and mercy. Our journey of faith entails learning not to lean on our own understanding or seek justification in our works but to open up our hands to receive mercy from our creator. This is true for everyone, but for this particular cohort, their daily lives confront them with the reality that we can, in the final analysis, only be given worth and be justified by our creator.

What I find delightful and strange though, is how many people emerge happy on the other side of this, somewhere in their mid- to late 70s, almost certainly by early 80s. People age physically and emotionally at different rates; I am not trying to define a precise formula. Suffice to say, I’ve rarely ever gotten into a conflict situation with someone in their 80s in my church. But I’ve gotten into plenty of conflicts with people in their 70s, especially mid- to upper 70s. Those in the 80s have (typically) emerged from the three-quarter life crisis with an infectious joie de vivre, a profound sense of calm in spite of the obstacles that lay before them.

This capacity to emerge from a crisis more whole should not surprise us. As humans we get knocked down by the winds of life, but we are endowed with and develop a certain resilience. When it comes to the midlife crisis, plenty of people end up wrecking their marriages or aspects of their life. Yet, many people also progress through the midlife crisis in a profound way, switching careers into a helping profession or orienting their careers and their finances toward giving back rather than getting ahead. In the same way, most young adults eventually move out of their parents’ basements, finally finding the courage to make commitments to career and spouse that allow them to build a life.

Watching people move through life the seasons of life certainly affirms the pattern laid out in the Bible’s great book of prayers, the Psalms. Life follows a pattern of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. Luther said baptism entails the daily dying to sin and rising to new life; I want to offer that this happens daily but perhaps seasonally too as we need to shed significant ways of doing and being. My sense is that sanctification often looks like a fundamental reorientation or recalibration of our life.

What might reorientation look like in this “three-quarter” season? First, people in this cohort are likely growing spiritually at a faster rate than in their whole life. I don’t simply mean they are learning new exotic ways to pray, although this may be true. I mean they are likely more open to significant self-reflection, confession, and compassion. In fact, they may be the people that actually listen to sermons (or podcasts or audiobooks) about sin, surrender, and grace.

That said, this is a group that likely needs help in bearing witness to Christ. They are coming to realize their whole life they’ve been forgiven, healed, and guided by God out of sheer divine grace. Yet they likely don’t know how to talk about this, especially not within their own family. There is profound grief, shame, and frustration among people in this cohort when they feel they cannot share their faith with their children and grandchildren. I have addressed this need by offering people a different kind of funeral planning resource, one that focuses on sharing stories about why certain songs or scripture or worship activities matter to them, rather than simply listing what they want.

Second, people in this stage of life are likely very good listeners. I once tried to have young adults help me with confirmation. I figured the youth needed people they could look up to. This always failed because the young adults were still way too into themselves. The older people, who have no pretense at being cool, disarm the youth with their sincerity and patience. What do young people need? How about someone who can listen non-judgmentally, pray for them, and offer a word of spiritual counsel! That is not the job of a twentysomething but a 70- or 80-something. The medicine for the one going through the three-quarter crisis may just be a grumpy teenager (and vice versa!).

Third, this group needs to be equipped to bless others. As a pastor, I always felt guilty that I needed to offer certain people home visits. They were such pillars of faith. I knew they were praying for me. The entire visit was a testimony to God’s power in their lives capped off with a big dollop of telling me how much they cared for me. I felt like I was being paid to visit the emotional candy store. I wonder, how might others receive this blessing? What has this looked like in your family?

Toward the beginning of Luke, the church gets a peek at what such a cross-generational blessing might look like: The older Elizabeth has needed to reorient her whole sense of self and God due to her miraculous pregnancy. Yet, she is able to put her own situation aside and serve as a witness, a refuge, and a blessing to the younger Mary. (I have to wonder if only an older person could so easily put aside their own situation to be present for another person!) The child in the womb of Elizabeth, John the Baptist, leaps in Elizabeth, encouraging Elizabeth to make her confession of faith to the younger Mary. Emboldened, the teenage/young adult Mary then sings a song that has echoed across the generations: My soul magnifies the Lord. Families — especially the church family — have always been at their best when the generations can come together to learn, worship, and serve. This is true in good times but also in times of crisis, be it mid-life, quarter-life or even three-quarter life.