Life begins at 60?
This week I celebrated my 60th birthday – a milestone that once seemed so far away and out of reach. When I was first diagnosed with stage IV cancer at the age of fifty-one, I thought I would be lucky to see my 52nd birthday. But then God did something amazing in my life and after a year of treatment I went into remission for six years —until the day after my 58th birthday I was once again diagnosed with cancer.
There then followed two very difficult years as I weakened under the onslaught of chemotherapy and sepsis and then nearly lost my life following surgery. However earlier this year I had my final surgery and was just before my 60th birthday was told that I was in complete remission – the most wonderful gift from God.
As a young woman I dreaded the idea of turning sixty, as I viewed this age as the beginning of the end. As I looked around at my mother’s generation, with their blue-rinsed perms and sensible shoes, too many of them seemed to be simply biding their time until they neared the end of their ‘three score years and ten.’
Much has changed however in the last few decades. These days the average life expectancy in the UK is 81.7 years (83 for a woman) although I know so many who have lasted well into their nineties. In fact, life expectancy increased twenty times faster between 2007 and 2011 than it did between 1841 and 1970 - so for most of us turning sixty, it isn’t unreasonable to expect to last another thirty years.
When I look back over my life since I was thirty, I am staggered at how much has happened. Thirty years ago, I had yet to meet my husband, have children, begin working in the media or find my faith. It wasn’t until the second third of my life that I became a wife and mother, came to Christ and found my calling which, with World Vision, to some of the most challenging places on the planet and ultimately turned me into a preacher and author. So, I look forward to the third phase of life with a keen sense of anticipation.
There seems to be a recurring theme in the Bible that the number sixty relates to the changing of seasons. In Old Testament times, at the age of sixty, men and woman were able to redeem themselves from a vow by paying a fraction of the usual number of shekels to the temple – freeing themselves from mistakes made in the first two thirds of life. And Isaac had to wait until he was sixty years old before Rebecca gave birth to their sons Esau and Jacob – the father of the tribes of Israel. I was also interested to find out that the word Sabbath – which points to the transition from work to rest - is used sixty times in the Bible.
With the shift in the retirement age, fewer people stop work at sixty, but perhaps we are encouraged to move towards a more reflective approach to life and God. In my book Soul’s Scribe, I explore what the Franciscan Friar Richard Rohr describes as a second half of life faith in which we are more able to surrender our desire for control and intellectual certainty and embrace the full mystery of God - and while the maths is slightly out of alignment - this may also apply to the third part of our lives.
Certainly, in facing my own mortality, I seem to I seem to have entered a different stage of faith. And as I enter this third phase of life, I notice that I am more able to surrender the need to always ‘know’ and to embrace the mystery that is Yahweh, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of things, and to pray ‘Thy will be done’ and truly mean it.
So, rather than seeing turning sixty as the beginning of the end, I am joyfully embracing this birthday as the end of the beginning.
Kate Nicholas is a preacher, Christian author, broadcaster and consultant. Visit Kate’s website www.katenicholas.co.uk to find out more about her books, TV show, online courses and blog Faith, Life and Cancer.