These middle years of adulting (and middle months of the school year with teenagers) have me feeling thin-souled and needy. I’m clinging to the same truths that held me when I first came to faith, but with deepened desperation and dependence. I am surprised by the dynamic stasis of this season: everything seems to changing (my body, our boys, our schedules, our lives), yet the Word of God is the same. The world has a different narrative for the middle years of adulthood which normalizes drastic changes emerging from midlife crises. In place of drastic change and chasing newness, the gospel invites us to double down, to dig deeper into the ancient truths that anchor us into deep time.

As I’ve been reading through John’s epistles, I’ve found an unexpected model and mentor for navigating the long middle years of ministry and motherhood. John wrote his letters somewhere between 85-100 AD, though most scholars pin his pen to Ephesus between 90-95 A.D, most likely many years after writing his account of Jesus’s life. How encouraging, then, to read strong similarities in both.

The one who recorded Jesus’s extended lesson on the need to abide in his love in his absence expressed the same lesson to the early church from his middle years. Time, which can often have an erosive power, only made the memories of Jesus’s lessons mark him more deeply. John didn’t seek an emerging theology, a new truth, or a new trend; rather, he immersed himself more deeply in the truths of Christ.

Fifty-ish years after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, John continued to build his life on the very words which proceeded from Jesus’s mouth. The similarities between John 1 and 1 John 1:1-4 soothe my middle-aged soul. The times had changed, but John’s themes hadn’t. He was still pointing to the light of the world (John 8: 12; 1 John 1:5). Even as his problems (and the problems of the world around him) expanded, his focus on separation from God as our biggest problem sharpened (1 John 1:8-2:6). He offered the same Jesus who was the living water from the deeper-worn well of his life (John 7:37–39). I long to do the same on the other side of these long middle-life years.

I wonder if Jesus’s words “Abide in me, and I in you…I am the vine; you are the branches” pulsed through John’s heart and mind as he wrote a similar lesson to the saints (John 15: 4; 5). I wonder if tears welled in his eyes and blotted the parchments as he remembered the eyes of his precious Jesus. I wonder if he wondered at how much had changed between those two time stamps: his brother killed by the sword, many of the others disciples martyred, the graying of hair, the wrinkling of skin, the longing of waiting so long for Jesus’s return.

“No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him and he in God. So we have to come and to believe the love that God has for us” (1 John 4: 11–16).

Between Jesus inviting his disciples to abide in his love and John’s invitation to the early church to do the same spanned yawning, exhausting years of life. When persecution rose, John didn’t run to find a more comfortable and palatable truth. When, likely only a few years after writing his epistles, he was exiled on an island alone, he didn’t throw his hands up, thus throwing in the towel on his theology. The passage of time taught him to cling more deeply to Christ. The stacking of years only increased his reliance on the Rock of Ages.

Sunday by Sunday, one or two pews behind me, a precious woman named Priscilla stands and sings. We sing the same hymns, but Priscilla has 104 years of life compelling her song. Our notes are the same, but the depth of our songs are different. Her mere presence in our pews entices me to remain steadfast in these seasons of massive upheaval and change.

May the passage of time only press us more deeply into the gospel. May multiplied years find us offering the same water from deeper wells. Grass withers, flowers fade, wrinkles deepen, strength wanes. The Word of God remains the same even as it leaves us changed and transformed into his likeness (Isaiah 40: 8; 2 Corinthians 3:18)