10 min read ⭑
“Our culture has so much to say — too much to say, one might argue — to middle-aged women: count your steps, count your protein, take your collagen. Awash in well-intended, though often ill-timed, advice, I found myself scouring the Scriptures for ancient truths that might anchor me.”
As a writer, Aimee Joseph loves words — fiction and nonfiction alike. But her first literary love has always been Scripture. So it’s no surprise she’s a church planter and pastor’s wife, too. Although she’s had to fit writing around ministry and raising three boys over the years, she’s managed to write five books, including “Look, Listen, Live,” “Demystifying Decision-Making,” “Made to Rest” and more. Join our conversation with Aimee as she digs into Saturday breakfasts in San Diego as a New Jersey native, the spiritual lessons she’s learned from thrifting and the advice she’s taking — and not taking — in this season of middle age. Aimee has reserved these words specifically for Rapt readers like you. We hope they leave you inspired.
QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT
Food is always about more than food; it’s also about home and people and love. So how does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind your web bio?
I grew up on the Jersey Shore, which means that I know bagels (and kaiser rolls, but I digress). Although they likely clogged my arteries, pork roll, egg and cheese sandwiches are a hallmark of my childhood. All that to say, we take breakfast pretty seriously in our family.
On rare, slow Saturday mornings, you better believe we are eating bagels as a family. They are cheap, filling and delicious. This makes them the breakfast of choice in our family of three teenage sons. While San Diego bagels have nothing on New Jersey bagels, we have settled into our routine of weekend bagelling.
While we all still have much to learn about cooking, everyone in our family can make a mean breakfast sandwich. But it’s more than the bagels; it’s the conversations we have around them that I love most.
When I first became a mother, the transition was rough: slow days, stacking needs, little sleep. However, now that I am releasing sons, I realize what a privilege it has been to sit around the table with my raucous crew all these years. All those breakfasts add up to precious, formative years that I treasure.
New mornings, new mercies. New trials, new table conversations.
Jonny Gios; Unsplash+
QUESTION #2: REVEAL
What “nonspiritual” activity have you found to be quite spiritual, after all? What quirky proclivity, out-of-the-way interest or unexpected pursuit refreshes your soul?
At least twice a week, you will find some configuration of our family in a thrift store. Our thrifting obsession began as a necessity, as five humans living on a pastor’s budget in San Diego means tight living spaces and an even tighter budget. When our boys were young, they endured their well-worn clothing, even asking specifically for “things with real price tags” for Christmas. However, over time, thrifting has become part of the warp and woof of our family rhythms of rest and reconnection.
There is something calming and creative about slowly sifting through rack upon rack of tattered clothing. Thrifting also favors the consistent. You have to be committed to the cause and ready to walk away empty-handed. Not every day is a great day. There are few words to describe the feeling of finding a treasure from someone’s throwaway pile. We celebrate together even if we don’t quite categorize the piece as the diamond in the rough that the finder may see.
The spiritual lessons aren’t always overt, but they are there, just as the thrifted grails are littered in the bins. After all, seeing new purpose in old, tattered things smacks of the Savior. In a mass-produced culture encouraging efficiency, thrifting teaches nuanced noticing. In contrast to the instant gratification of online shopping, vintage shopping trains a long obedience in the same direction. Every purchase has a story, just as every person has a story.
QUESTION #3: CONFESS
Every superhero has a weakness; every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re all broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite, and how do you confront its power?
In his poem “Ash-Wednesday,” T.S. Eliot pleads, “Teach us to care and not to care.” When I first read those lines in high school, they confounded me. But now that I find myself smack in the middle years of adulthood, they instruct me. The same hyper-responsibility that earned me accolades and skyrocketed my achievement for years now threatens to choke out the joy and peace purchased for me by Christ.
It took me decades to be able to name the sin under high-achieving and overly responsible tendencies. They have been such a pattern of my existence that I honestly thought they were my personality. It turns out that they come from imagining myself at the center rather than Christ, who holds all things together (see Col. 1:17). This insidious self-centeredness took a while to confess because it didn’t present as self-centeredness; it presented as excellence, consideration and dependability.
As my sons became young men, I realized that my over-bearing patterns (meaning carrying too much) were making me an overbearing (meaning domineering) parent. Now, I find myself constantly confessing my desire to control that often stems from a deep care that has forgotten God as “the blessed controller of all things” (1 Tim. 6:15, PHILLIPS).
Learning to care and not to care is a daily battle for me. Imagining thriving long-term relationships with my loved ones helps me stop stepping into spaces the Savior intends to fill himself. God cares, so I don’t have to over-care.
QUESTION #4: FIRE UP
Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?
One of my pastoral heroes, Eugene Peterson, likens his younger self to “a Labrador puppy, full-grown but uncoordinated, romping and playful but ... oblivious to its master’s command: ‘Sit.’” Moving from frantically fetching to learning to sit and stay resonates with me as I enter into the middle years of my life. (In fact, I wrote a book on resisting restlessness called “Made to Rest.”)
To be honest, these midlife years hit me like a freight train. I didn’t expect such massive transitions all at once: the sudden drops in hormones that had helped me sustain a similar pace for most of my life, the massive changes to our home as sons began to leave the nest, the questioning of calling and purpose in a new season. They came when I was running on fumes from building and raising both a family and a church alongside my husband. As a writer, words help me process both my internal and external realities. Thus, as a middle-aged woman, I found myself writing a book on walking with God through the turbulence of perimenopause — something that would make my middle-school self blush profusely.
Our culture has so much to say — too much to say, one might argue — to middle-aged women: count your steps, count your protein, take your collagen. Awash in well-intended, though often ill-timed, advice, I found myself scouring the Scriptures for ancient truths that might anchor me. The bad news is that my hormones are still creating sudden storm fronts; the good news is that Christ still knows how to calm storms.
QUESTION #5: BOOST
Whether we’re cashiers or CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need God’s love flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?
I always thought that one eased into reading glasses. Perhaps this is true for some, but for me, it was an overnight situation. One day, I could see well as I sustained my voracious reading habits; the next, everything was blurry. I swallowed my pride and jumped into the middle years of womanhood, and I now proudly don reading glasses.
I share this story because what happened to my physical sight also began happening to my spiritual sight.
Fatigue breaks down form. Exhaustion and moving at the speed of teenagers — I mean, sound — make it challenging to slow down enough to really see. Just as my blurred physical sight compelled me to find necessary help in magnifying lenses, my blurred spiritual sight has been teaching me to slow down enough to truly see.
Writing requires seeing before saying, noticing before note-taking. So in that sense, I am learning to view this new midlife season as an opportunity to sharpen my sight. Having spent decades preparing my sons for their future, I find myself, like Annie Dillard, one of my writing heroes, “in the market for some present tense.”
This is where the Holy Spirit shows up in my life at present. He helps me see, notice. In addition to helping me cultivate a curiosity for God’s Word, which he illuminates, he is teaching me to lovingly study God’s image-bearers. Like Thomas Hardy in his poem, “Afterwards,” I want to be known as a noticer.
rQUESTION #6: inspire
Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you in this season?
When I first came to know Christ as a teenager who wasn’t raised in the church, I was a Scripture-memorizing machine. I couldn’t get enough of God’s Word; I wanted it crammed into every corner of my heart. In my postcollege years, I similarly threw myself into memorizing my favorite poems. However, as life got busier and my mind became more cluttered by the cares and worries of raising a family and starting a church, I spent less and less time memorizing anything but my shopping or to-do lists.
One of the hallmark experiences of perimenopause is a brain fog that feels as thick as Karl, the fog in San Francisco that is formidable enough to merit a name of its own. I have a hard time remembering my next word. I lose my train of thought multiple times a day.
While that may seem a strange time to pick up the practice of memorizing both Scripture and poetry, I am hopping back on the bandwagon. If ever there was a time to practice concentration and attention on that which is good and beautiful and praiseworthy (à la Phil. 4:8-9), it is now.
The Spirit’s job is to bring things to remembrance, and my job seems to be forgetting things. What a perfect pairing. It takes longer than it did 20 years ago, but it is well worth the effort. As Dallas Willard reminds us, “Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning.”
QUESTION #7: FOCUS
Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top three resources stand out to you? What changed reality and changed your heart?
My friends and family jokingly call me an intellectual lint roller. So this is a tough question. It forces me to cull through crowded resources to curate a few that have profoundly impacted me. I shall approach this question using the paradigm of identity, community and mission.
Identity. This one is a tie (see how I sneaked an extra resource in there?) between two writers: A.W. Tozer and Henri Nouwen. Nouwen writes from the trenches and Tozer from the mountaintops. But when it comes to identity, we need both, don’t we? We need someone who speaks to our shadow side and reminds us how loved we are, which is exactly what Nouwen does in “The Life of the Beloved.” We also need someone who calls us up to our glory selves and compels us to keep climbing spiritually, which is exactly what Tozer did and still does for me in his classic book “The Pursuit of God.”
Community. This one goes to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s short but power-packed book “Life Together.” No single book outside of the Bible has served to instruct me in how to love people in real life more than good old Dietrich. He writes as one who lived in a complex community during complicated times.
Mission. J.I. Packer for the win on this one. I reread his book “Knowing God” every few years, and I still feel like I have barely scratched the surface. We will never come to the end of our need to know God.
QUESTION #8: dream
God’s continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?
As I have been swimming through all the complex emotions of an emptying nest, I have swimming (and scores of other things) on my mind. Living in San Diego, I have always wanted to try open-water swimming, but I haven’t had any time (or courage) to do so.
While I cannot guarantee that open-water swimming is in my future, I know that I intend to try new things in this new season. As scary as it is to try new things in middle age, I sense God stirring me to risk in both small and significant ways.
Although I have written five books, I feel new words gathering alongside new works. I am looking forward to actively engaging more locally, both in our church community and in our surrounding city. I’ve spent the past six months working for a local nonprofit, which has opened my eyes to all the complex needs of our city. Now that my biological children are heading into their own adventures, I am excited to invest in the next generation spiritually and practically. I don’t want to waste these middle years of womanhood obsessing over my waistline. I want to step toward others with the intention and space this new season affords me.
I want our little corner of San Diego to look more and more like the kingdom of God. In a day of global news, there is much work to be done locally. And I am here for it.
As she navigates middle age and an emptying nest, Aimee is going back to one of the basics of spiritual growth: memorizing God’s Word. This ancient practice has helped countless generations of believers hide Scripture in their hearts.
But it also has other benefits. Memory work in middle age, especially for women in menopause, has been found to boost mental performance, which some research suggests leads to greater happiness and confidence in later years.
Poems, songs, speeches — there are numerous ways to work on your memory besides Scripture. But as the psalmist says, “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple” (Ps. 19:7, ESV).
What will you memorize next?
Aimee Joseph is a church-planting wife, mother to three teenage sons and author of several books, including Made to Rest and her latest, Midlife Plot Twist. She and her husband, G’Joe, live in San Diego, California, where they serve together at Center City Church. Decades of college ministry forged in them a passion to invest in the next generation. Aimee writes at the intersection of literature, theology and practical living. When she isn’t writing or serving in the local church, she is reading, walking her German Shepherd at the beach and drinking copious amounts of coffee.