We had just started, in our last class period, talking about life-family cycles. And we want to pick up there, and we had talked about early marriage, that is prior to children, and then right after that is when children come in, to the picture, which is the expanding family. And we're on to life cycle number three, which is another aspect of the expanding family, when the children become school age.

And again, we're saying approximately this is ages between 28 and 35, when the kids reach this particular time, and there is a whole set of unique dynamics that are going on at this time, that we are going to call developmental paths again. So what's happening to a family where the kids now are off to school, maybe they go to a Christian school, maybe they go to a public school, or maybe the school room's right there in their own home, but they still have a certain number of hours during the day where mom is usually the one overseeing the school work or they're off to school at some other location.

So you've got things going on here, like adjusting to the first child entering school. When that happens, you don't spend as much time just randomly spending personal time with the child, that child's now preoccupied with their studies and work, and if mom and dad are homeschooling, then there's a lot of intense work and preparation and setting up class schedules and curriculum that's going on there that's different.

Everything changes. Or if that child's off to school, then you have a tendency to wonder, how's it going with the input that's coming from the teacher? How's my child adjusting to friends at school and interacting within that environment? So there's adjusting to that, and then there's this adjustment to the last child entering school as well, when all of a sudden the home is empty again if they go off to school.

If they're being homeschooled, of course the home's not empty, but usually it's a lot quieter because they usually have their little work-study areas where they go to, and they have to read or study or write papers or do drawings. So usually things are a lot quieter around the home.

And then there's adjustment, sometimes if children are sent off to work, a lot of Christian families do this, usually a wife will actually re-enter the workforce. That is, she gets a job, more often than not it's a part-time job, to kind of supplement the family income, and she's away from the house during the day, but usually they have it planned out in such a way where either dad or mom gets home around 3 or 3.30 in the afternoon when the kids get home and get off the bus, and so they're there to welcome them when they get home, but a lot of families live with that as well.

And this is just a daily routine that they go through. Now one of the big struggles that go along with this is learning how to balance multiple roles. At work, with your husband or wife, at church, with the family, with the community, there's all kinds of different things that are going on there, and different roles that the husband or wife are involved in, sometimes they're a part of Bible studies at church, or sometimes they're a part of ministries, a children's ministry at church, or they're a part of a high school or a junior high ministry at church, and so they have different roles there, maybe they lead a Bible study in their own home, so they have a role that they take up there.

So there's an adjustment to all these things that are going on, and not only does mom and dad usually have a busy personal schedule, but the kids, because of their school responsibilities and homework and so on, they also are extremely busy, so the family now is divided in several different directions.

Now in counseling, you've got to understand that. When you get a couple that comes to you that's at this particular stage of life where the children are school age, these are some of the issues that they're going to be facing. There's also adjusting to this phase of child rearing, where if the kids are going off to school, whether it's Christian school or public school, they're usually coming home with new attitudes and new vocabulary, and that's going to change things a lot, in fact it may not be very pleasant vocabulary, this is not something that you say around the house, and it's not something that you want in your Christian home, so you have to end up challenging that vocabulary.

Sometimes they come home with attitudes that you've never seen them have before. Usually they've had very pleasant attitudes, but now that's changed. Or maybe you've had a very compliant child, but now that child is starting to show some resistance. They're going to challenge mom and dad and what mom and dad thinks, because they think they're pretty hot stuff now that they're in school, or so they think.

So there's this adjustment to this phase of child rearing. Now oftentimes at this particular stage also dad is going through a readjustment in terms of his career goals. Usually he's fairly well-established in his job, of course there are certain exceptions to that, but usually fairly well-adjusted in his job, and he's starting to climb the corporate ladder, so to speak, and get certain advancements in his job, but he has mixed feelings about it.

There are good things that he likes about the job, and there are things he doesn't like about the job, and he's frequently saying to his wife when he comes home in the evening, "You know what, I'm not sure I could see myself doing this the rest of my life," which puts a little bit of panic in her heart, "You're not going to resign your job, are you?

That's our income, and we got to be able to feed the kids. I don't know whether I'm really cut out to do this forever, is this really what I really want to do?" So there's all kinds of readjustments going on there. Then it's at this particular stage that you begin to relate to your parents as fellow adults.

There's a change there as well. All of your life you related to them as a child, or as a young man or young woman, and now you're relating to your parents as fellow adults, because you're rearing your own children now. You're making your own decisions, and most of the time you're making these decisions almost entirely on your own.

Occasionally you may consult them for their wisdom, but most of the time it's on your own. So how do you relate to them that way? Certainly one of the ways you can relate in a positive way is by tapping some of their wisdom as parents. They've gone through this stage of life before with you, and they learned some things that should be done and things that should not be done during that particular phase or stage of life.

So you can do that, but also you can learn from their negative examples, not just their positive examples. In fact, mom and dad will probably say, "You know, if I had to do over again, I would have done this." Sometimes that's the best thing you can learn from them, and that's okay.

So they're now sharing with you things that they've never shared with you before because you were too young to even hear them or even appreciate them, but now that you're facing these very same problems in your life with the children and the challenges of school and the responsibilities of a job and career and so on, this is all new.

And then, here's a biggie. At this particular stage of life, you begin to realize that you have to adjust your goals and dreams to reality. Usually when a person is younger, they think they're going to set the world on fire. That's what they believe. "Wow, I am God's answer to the world." And they find out that God has a much more modest plan for their life.

Oh, God's still going to use them and still going to use them in a very impactful way, but it's not the big way that they thought it was going to be. And so they begin to readjust their goals and their dreams to reality. I thought we'd be here at this particular stage financially in our home, or I thought we'd be this far along in my career, or I thought we'd be this far along in our spiritual development and growth as a family and as a couple, and they're beginning to realize, you know, we're not even close to some of these goals.

That's okay. The fact that you are growing, you are changing, and you realize you need to grow and change is probably the most significant thing there. So what we're saying is families that come into counseling can be somewhat disillusioned about life, and you have to take that into account when you're working with them.

Why are they disillusioned? What's the major struggle that's going on in their life? So, which really brings us to the strains and temptations, what are they? Well, one of them is that, as I've mentioned, there's financial strains, automobile, family necessities. As the kids get older, they need special treatment medically, dental treatment.

You realize you have to mortgage your house in order to get braces for the kids, you know, and their teeth. You almost have to sell your firstborn in order to repair the car. There's major things going on there that are financial strains. And then there's a lot of decisions about education here at this stage.

Well, should we send our kids to Christian school here in the area? Should we homeschool our kids? The positive side is we have a lot of input directly into how our kids develop and their growth and development. The negative side of it is it's very time demanding. Do we have enough time to spend and do all of this?

What about the public school system? Some Christian parents say, "Listen, I've reared my kids to think and live like a Christian. I want them to learn how to be salt and light out there in the world, and I'm not going to teach them how to be salt and light by keeping them behind closed doors or keeping them in purely a Christian environment.

I want to send them out in a sense into the world and learn how to live among people of the world so they can be a testimony to the world." I remember several years ago when I was pastoring, we had a very large Christian school there in our area.

It was the largest one in the country, and several of the members of the leadership of that school came to our church, and we had a lot of families that sent their kids to the Christian school system, and then we had a number of families that sent their kids to the public school system, and we had a whole other group of families that homeschooled their kids.

Generally, now I'm speaking generally, the kids that had the most dynamic testimony in the youth group were the kids that went to the public school system, and one day we sat down with the pastoral staff and we were talking about this, and I remember our conversation and the flow of it.

Why is that so? Why are the kids that are coming out of the public school system have such a dynamic testimony for Christ? And the conclusion that we came to was that every day they went into that public school system, they faced criticism and ridicule for their faith, and they had to make a decision that day, "Am I going to stand with Christ, or am I going to be a chameleon and act like everybody else in the world?" And it's that decision that they had to make every day that made them firm in their Christian stand, and to make that firm.

I'm not saying that public school system is the only way to go. I'm not saying that at all, okay? So don't bring out your theological guns and aim them at me, okay? Because there was a period of time where we sent our kids to the Christian school and we also homeschooled our children.

I think that is an individual decision that parents have got to make, and they've got to do it. They know their kids. There are certain things, certain circumstances that are going on in those children's lives that may be unique, and so they'll need a unique approach. Some kids fit real well in a Christian school, and we really recommend that.

Other kids are just very dynamic, and they stand on their own really well and think through things really well, so they function real well in a public school system. Other children, I will say this, when we homeschooled our kids, I don't think that they're... I think that they developed scholastically a lot faster when they were homeschooled.

I can say that. There's certainly a very positive side to that scholastic development. In fact, for several years, we homeschooled the kids, and we finally sent it to a public school system because there were so many things that that school system could do in the area of biology and science and stuff like that that we couldn't do in a home situation.

Not even with our cooperative homeschool environment there, we couldn't do that same thing. By the time they went from homeschooling into that public school system, the kids at their grade level thought our kids were geniuses, and they weren't. They were not geniuses. We didn't raise four geniuses, but they thought that they were because their homeschooling had trained them so well in comparison to what they had received in the public school system.

What I'm saying is there's plus and a minus to every system, and parents have to weigh those type of things out. This particular family is going through that kind of struggle. Some missionaries in different parts of the world, they can't send their kids to the public school system, and it's impossible to do that.

They have to homeschool. Sometimes they opt for video school in terms of homeschooling or some other means, so they just can't do it. All we're highlighting here is the fact that at this particular stage of life where the kids are school age, the parents face this kind of a struggle, and they actually may come to you for counsel on what do you think is the best thing to do, what's the best way we can be good stewards of the short amount of time that we have with our kids.

There's another issue that they face, a strain, husbands being away from home with outside activities for the kids. Usually kids get involved in a lot of things, ice skating, swimming lessons, karate lessons, soccer, football. There's all kinds of things that kids get involved in, and you find yourself being a shuttle all over the place, and the husband usually works late at night or well into the evening with a high demanding job.

So that brings up some strains, and then you begin to realize the kids are getting old enough to really get into some real good conflicts, struggles, sibling rivalry, arguments. Now I know this never happened in your home, but it certainly did in our home. I'll never forget when our boys were first introduced to Nintendo and what that did to them.

So there's arguments like that that can occur. There's difficulty managing children, and each child you have to treat individually because they each have their own little strengths and weaknesses, their own little temptations, and sometimes you can't cookie cutter kids in child rearing. You've got to be wise, not any more than you like to be cookie cuttered at your job or even at church, and you are just considered to be one among many people, all the same type of people.

No, you don't like that. You want to be treated as an individual, and your kids are the same way. So there's difficulty in managing the kids. You begin to realize there's a lot of things that are going by in life that are going by so fast that you don't have any...you realize there's a lot of unfulfilled tasks.

I'm not getting everything done that I need to get done. And sometimes people will come, husbands, wives will come and talk with you about the guilt that they have of all these unfinished tasks. I'm not getting this done, I'm not getting that done, I'm not being a responsible husband or parent or wife or mother.

And again, as I hinted at before, under the developmental tasks, there's dissatisfaction with job and career. Husbands beginning to rethink things usually at this stage, "Is this what I really want to do for the rest of my life?" And there's a certain discouragement and difficulty that occurs in the job.

Or there's promotion or new responsibilities and demands of the job, and maybe even there's a decision to make a career change. "Now, this is not the job that I want, I want to get another one. So what's going on with that career change?" And when kids start into school, whether it's homeschool, Christian school, public school, whatever the case, you find that you have to handle behavioral or learning problems of the kid.

Behavioral or learning problems. This becomes a challenge because every parent expects all their kids to be geniuses. And they find out that they're not. In fact, our kids have a learning difficulty. And how am I going to deal with that learning difficulty? When I was a boy, I was totally dyslexic.

In fact, if you took my third grade papers and you held them up to a mirror, you could read them perfectly. I wrote everything exactly backwards. Switch things in my mind. And so my mother still has some of those papers. And she reminds me, keeps me very humble, of those papers.

You could read everything backwards. I used to jokingly say, "Of all the things in seminary that I excelled at, of all the things, it was Hebrew that I excelled the most." I did. I loved Hebrew and it just came to me very naturally. And I often wondered whether or not it was because of my dyslexia because now I'm finally reading the direction that I want to read, all right, from the opposite direction.

It was just natural for me to read that direction. I don't know. I don't know whether there's any substance to that whatsoever. But you find out your kids have learning problems. And they're not catching on to things quite as well and they need special work. And I remember I had so many problems with this when I was in third grade that I would have nightmares at night as a kid.

I'd wake up in the middle of the night screaming. I'd have nightmares about my schoolwork because it was driving me crazy. And they'd give me all these IQ tests and stuff and I would score very well on those. That was no problem. But until they discovered that I had this problem with dyslexia and because I was seeing things completely different than what the other kids in class were looking at.

So you're going to find out your kids are like that and you're going to minister to people whose kids who have problems like that. And these parents are going to be very discouraged, disheartened. This is not what they had planned for their life. They've got other things that they had planned that they wanted to do.

Well, all of this is a part of rearing children in a godly way and being a good steward with your child. So handling these behavioral or learning problems of the kids. You may raise two or three kids and they're generally obedient kids. I mean, they do well, but also you may have one kid that decides to be the little rebel.

And this kid demands all of your time. This little rebel just challenges you every step of the way. The rest of the kids, they are well behaved. And frequently in parenting conferences I get this question, what do you do with a kid like that? And actually those kind of kids don't bother me a whole lot and I don't think they should bother parents a whole lot.

Yes, they are more demanding. Yes, they're going to demand more time. That's usually the frustration with parents. They're not willing to give that time and they've got to learn that that's just what they got to do. But those parents or those children are just being really upfront. They're just being who they are.

They're laying everything on the table. This is the way they are. And I'd rather deal with a kid like that than the sweet little kid that sits back and always obeys but on the inside is a little rebel. In the long run, that kid is the more dangerous kid because they're not being genuine.

They're hiding themselves and you don't see that kid really come to the surface until they have a little bit of autonomy later on in adolescence. And all of a sudden the parents are saying, "I don't understand. This kid has always been an obedient kid. I don't know why he or she would ever do this." Well, because they tended to ignore that kid and focus on the kid that constantly gave them problems.

When you need to address the hearts of every single kid in that family, it's not just the one that's real demanding. You think about the one that's always obedient and always wants to make mom and dad happy. In the long run, I think that's a more dangerous kid because you can easily lose that kid over the years.

They sit in the back and they're very quiet and they don't have a whole lot to say but inside their heart is really going a completely different direction and that never gets challenged. So you're not just handling learning problems but you're also handling behavioral problems with kids. There's the challenge.

Which brings us to life cycle number four, which is the maturing family. Probably parents approximate ages 35 to 45, this is families with teenagers. During this particular stage of life, as the parents grow older, they begin to reevaluate their career again. For the first time, all of a sudden, mom begins to experience menopause.

I tell men, usually in counseling, "Don't dread menopause. For the first time in your life, your wife will be the same temperature as you." You know how she's always cold and you're always hot? Well, when she goes through menopause, you'll both be hot, okay? So she's always freezing. When she goes through menopause, now you'll both and you'll say to her, "This is the way I've been all of my life." At least you only have to experience it for a short amount of time.

So handling menopause and all the difficulties that go along with that, there's a reassessment of the marriage, usually during this time. What's the progress? What's the satisfaction of the marriage when the kids become teenagers? You find the kids are usually off on their own. They have a little bit of their own freedom now where they can get out and maybe a vehicle and then go places and now mom and dad's left at home by themselves in the evening, lots of time to spend together.

For people who have made major good investments in their marriage, they look forward to that time. For other people who have not made investments in their marriage, they don't know what to do at that time. So there's a reassessment. Usually it's during this time that most couples stabilize their finances and their resources.

This is the time where they really begin to make money that they can put away for later on future health issues or retirement. This is where they begin to do that. Another developmental task at this particular stage is accepting individual differences with your mate, with your children. Children are now become opinionated.

They may or may not accept everything that mom and dad believe. You find out whether or not your child maybe made a profession of faith in Christ years before, but the real fruit of that is beginning to bear out at this stage of life. You begin to find out, "No, wait a minute.

Maybe my child doesn't know Christ." You're going through a lot of doubts, going through a lot of questions, and those questions may be serious enough that they really don't know the Lord, which tells us whether or not years before that was a real genuine commitment to Christ as Savior and Lord.

So there's differences there. It's at this particular stage of life in our home that my wife really became a believer when our child became young teenagers. Now, we thought she was a believer prior to this, but she wasn't. I shared with you that story, didn't I, a little bit about her teaching that classroom of girls and how she wanted to share with them the gospel.

Well, it's this particular stage of life that that happened. And then there's a shift of priorities in view of lifetime remaining. You realize that life's going by pretty quickly and you only have a short amount of time, and you begin to think through, "Okay, what am I doing that's really worthwhile and really is good for the kingdom of God, and what are the things that are peripheral things that I'm spending a lot of time with, but it really isn't advancing God's kingdom, it's not advancing my family, not advancing my wife or our children.

What's going on here?" So there's a shift here in your priorities. And then there's also handling the increased independence of the children. That's difficult to do, too. Now the kids are not as directly under your influence all the time, they're off with one activity after another. Usually the church adds to those activities even more, youth group activities and Bible studies, and there's just an awful lot of stuff that's going on during this time.

And so the kids aren't around as much. Some parents, they enjoy having the kids out of the house. Other parents, it's a little bit more difficult for them. You know, they really miss having the kids around. They're gone. The house is a lot quieter. Used to be your house was like a revolving door on the front door.

Kids going in and out, all kinds of action happening. Now it's quiet all the time. And some couples have a difficulty handling the quietness. And then you begin to learn how to accept a new role with the children. It's much less of a controlling structural role. You realize that your role in their lives is shifting to that as of being an advisor, where they come and seek your wisdom, not necessarily your rules.

Before you used to pass rules and you'd have a very structured home and you have certain things that these kids could do or not do. Now they're getting old enough where you're letting back, letting off on the rules, and we'll talk about this later on in the class, and you're giving them more freedom, freedom to make their own decisions, and with that freedom now, your role is changing from being less and less of an enforcer of rules to more and more of an advisor on decision making.

Some parents handle that shift well, other parents don't. It's hard to do that, to handle that. So what are the stresses and temptations here? Well, one is increased expenses for necessities, major purchases, education. It's usually at this stage where the kids end up adding to the home an additional automobile, where before you only had enough where you took the whole family around, but now they want to drive their own vehicle.

You're making decisions about college and you're beginning to save money for further education of the kid and send them to a university, and you realize that's going to cost an awful lot of money, an arm and a leg, to do that, and this is where oftentimes couples begin to talk about the wife reentering the workforce more on a permanent basis, a full-time basis, to get the kids through college.

In other words, they live on his salary, but they put the kids through college on her salary. That's usually what happens. So there's these increased expenses for necessities. I mean, you think it was bad when the kids were really little that you had a doctor's appointment. Now, my goodness, when they go to the doctor, it really costs something.

When they go to the dentist, it really costs something. They're bigger. They're still kids in adult bodies now, so it's going to be more expensive taking care of those. There's glasses they have to buy for them, contact lenses. One of my boys, just the other, last year was playing football there at the college and broke his nose, was elbowed.

This year, my other boy, we thought he broke his nose, but he didn't. He just got an elbow in the nose, and it just bled quite a bit, and it's a good thing he didn't break his nose. But those kind of things come up. They break their leg. They break their arm.

My son-in-law, I'll never forget, he played football in high school on the same team that my son played on, and during one of the games, he broke his leg. And his father is a wonderful friend of ours and a graduate of the seminary here, ran down the field to see his son and was leaning over looking at it, and it was a compound fracture, so the bone had come through the skin, was leaning over looking at it, and his father passed out and landed right on top of him.

Jess still talks about that. All right. So there's additional expenses. I mean, kids are expensive, man. The medical bills for that. When our twins were born, they were born premature. They were about two weeks premature. So they were in the neonatal intensive care unit of the hospital for one week until their body weight was sufficient to take them home.

Well, by the end of that week, I received a bill, now this was back in 1987. One week of our twins being in the hospital was $65,000. That was one week in 1987. I don't even hazard a guess on what that would be today. But multiply that times, I don't know, what, five or ten, and maybe you'd be pretty close to what the expense would be today.

Well, that was more than I had paid for my house. One week in the hospital, $65,000. I had only paid $60,000 for my home, which tells you that we were living in a much more reasonable area and at a much more reasonable time. But just one week in the hospital.

So kids can get very, very expensive. Well, this particular stage is no exception. So there's these increased responsibilities. Then there is also these differing views about freedom, responsibility, discipline of adolescence. And you run into this because your kids end up talking to the other kids that are teenagers, and they'll come home and say, "Well, their mother and daddy lets them stay out until 11 o'clock, why don't you let me stay out until 11 o'clock?" "Well, because I'm not their parent.

I'm your parent." Well, that doesn't seem to suffice. That's not a really good argument. It goes down really well. "You're treating me like a baby," and it becomes a big argument. So differing views about freedom, responsibility, what are they responsible for around the house. We always had certain things that our kids had to take care of that was beyond any kind of pay or reimbursement, it was just part of family living.

Everybody had certain chores that they were responsible to do. You can't imagine the discussion that occurred in our household when our kids got to be teenagers and found out that there were other Christian homes where kids didn't have to do that. Why do we have to do it? For years, they did the same thing.

Now they're asking, "Why do we have to do this?" Because you can be thankful that we're your parents. Well, they don't feel thankful. So there's differing views about responsibility, differing views of the discipline of adolescence. How do you discipline an adolescent? You can try paddling an adolescent and they'll look at you like, "Huh, what hit me?

Was that a fly?" So it's not very effective, it doesn't work. So you may have to resort to other means. You take away their cell phone, you think the world's come to an end, or their access to the internet, or their video games. You gotta find something, or their music, or their iPods, and you think that really speaks to them.

Now, how long does this have to be? You have to get their attention some way. Furthermore, there's also struggles with outside activities of the kids. And sometimes they conflict. You can't be everywhere at once. There's a performance where one kid's going to be in a particular game, a soccer game, or another kid's going to be having a ballet presentation.

So you can't be everywhere, and so you have to divide and conquer. There's also handling new responsibilities, promotion at work. As you're promoted, you get more responsibilities, and there's difficulty in managing teenagers as well. I mean, just take a teenager to the store to buy clothes, and you'll understand what a challenge that is.

Kids that could care less what they wore all of a sudden now become extremely picky about what they want to wear. "I can't wear that. I wouldn't be caught dead in that at school," they'd say. "Are you kidding me? That's not cool, mom." So just managing them. Then there's frustration with work that is growing, or tension caused by disagreements about how to respond to adolescents.

Maybe a husband and a wife have a disagreement on how to deal with them. She says to him, "You're being too harsh. Stop being so harsh. You've got to speak to their hearts." And he says to them, "Listen, if we don't get their attention, they're not going to treat us seriously.

We've got to be able to get their attention. Get them to listen to us." So there's a disagreement on how do you deal with the adolescents and the stress and the struggle that's going on there. Or there's a strain that's caused by rebellion or drug abuse or sexual activity.

This is where sometimes kids will horribly disappoint Christian parents. They'll get involved with people or drug abuse or alcohol or sexual activity. This is more and more displayed in the public entertainment and medium as normal for adolescents, which is causing a dramatic increase in teenage and adolescent pregnancies. That's going on.

So this is how do you respond to the adolescents? And then last of all here, there's also the strain caused by rebellion or drug abuse. Well, I love this. He says, "I just don't fit in anymore with anybody at school. My parents aren't divorced. I haven't been abused. And our family isn't dysfunctional.

I'm such a freak." That's the average Christian parent ends up facing that kind of thing, "I'm just such a freak." All right, this brings us to life cycle number five, life cycle number five, which we're going to call shrinking family or launching family, however you want to say that.

They're ages approximately 45 to 55 in this particular family. What are some of the unique developmental things that are going on here? Well, they're refocusing more attention on their mate and less on the kids at this particular stage of life. They're relating to their children as fledgling adults now.

And they see some childish things and childish decisions still in their kids, even though their kids maybe have now are in married, but they also see their kids as adults. And so mom and dad is usually struggling with how do I relate to them now as adults and let them make decisions where before, they can remember it wasn't that many years ago, they were making all their decisions for the kids.

Then there's adjusting to changing family responses to them where before mom and dad could just make a decision and they'd all get together for dinner or get together for a holiday or an event or a birthday party. Well now these kids have their own lives and they have their own schedules and they're going different directions and you can't just make a decision and get everybody together at the same time.

And that's hard. That's hard to make that transition. So you're going to get different responses back on things that you plan. There's also handling increased awareness of physical vulnerability, physical vulnerability. You can't do some of the things that you used to be able to do. You think you could.

You think, you feel like you did when you were 20 years of age, but your body does not respond the same way as when you were 20 years of age. It doesn't respond nearly as well as when you were younger. I'll never forget the realization of that came to me back a few years ago when I was off speaking at a family camp for this church.

And we were out and it was a beautiful setting, way out in the wilderness at this lake and this church had brought in all these tents and campers and they had brought in all kinds of food. We had a wonderful week. And they also had brought in a couple of boats to put on this lake where every year they'd always do water skiing.

And one of the guys brought in this super mega powered boat. I mean, it was unbelievable. And I'm going, oh. And I used to love to water ski in Sollum. I used to love to do that. But it had been several years since I had done it. So I was all excited about getting out there on the lake.

And so they hooked me up and I got in the back of the boat, got my skis on and got there in the water and was sitting there in the water and had the ski rope in front of me and I gave the thumbs up for him to hit that power boat.

And man, he hit that thing and those two engines were whoosh like this and just lifted me straight out of the water. Just whoom, right out of the water. And I thought, oh, this is so cool, for about a half a second. This is going to be great. And then I heard, I heard with my ears this snap.

And I'm going, hmm, I wonder what that is. And then I felt this excruciating pain in my leg. And I had ripped my hamstring, just really just ripped it. That thing lifted me out of the water and I was standing like this, ripped the hamstring. And I just went head over heels right back down into the water.

Just straight like that. It must have been quite something. I'm glad no one was filming it. It would have made America's funniest videos. But it just went right like that. And I rolled in the water and I was just in excruciating pain. By the time they got me back to shore, I couldn't hardly walk on my leg at all.

And the back of my leg, the whole back of my leg was all black and blue. It was bleeding under the surface. And I had really ripped that hamstring. Now, I used to run. I used to play sports. I used to ski. I never had any problems with any of that.

And I'm sitting, I'm going, what is wrong here? And then my wife eventually says, "John, you're getting older." No, that can't be. And for the next, I don't know, it must have been five, six weeks, I could barely walk on that leg until that crazy thing healed. But it just destroyed me.

Now, this is what, at this particular age, about 45 to 55, all of a sudden they're struggling now with their physical vulnerability. She can't do many of the things that she used to do and he can't do many of the things he used to do. So that's what's going to happen at this particular stage.

Now, also there's, your married children will pull away and establish their own cycles of life. It's at this stage. It's always a joyful time to see that happen, but also there's a certain amount of sadness because you realize your family's now beginning to dissolve and break up and go in several different directions and it's not the same as it used to be.

You're learning to cope with new people entering the family. You always look forward to a future son and daughter-in-law. You always look forward to that, but you never anticipated them bringing all their in-laws into this, too. That was not something that you bet on. Wow, you mean all their in-laws are coming in, too, the family?

So they're struggling with that, accepting new responsibilities. They have now especially advisory type of responsibilities. So all of these developmental tasks bring on a certain amount of strains and stresses, too. For example, financial ones, this is big because most of the kids now are definitely in college and that brings a strain on the family resources, along with keeping up with house payments and car payments and other things that are going on.

There's again the outside activities of the children that are part of these stresses and temptations. Unfulfilled tasks, again, become a big thing. Children leaving home for college or for marriage becomes part of this struggle, too. This is a time of a lot of happiness, but it's also a time of a lot of regret because couples begin to look back upon things that they wish they would have done.

I wish I would have done this with my family or that with my family. And frequently you'll find that a lot of couples, there's job or career changes that occur. Because now that they've got their children reared and they're off, they're just not happy with what they're doing. Well, it brought them a paycheck, but there's more to life than a paycheck, and I don't want to put up with the same pressures that I've put up with before.

I'm willing to accept a job that pays a lot less and I'm a lot happier at, and so there's frequent job changes. And then there are some close relatives or friends become seriously ill during this time. Some of them may even die. So you begin to find yourself going through a phase of life where you're starting to lose people that are really close to you and maybe suddenly die of a heart attack or maybe a car accident or somebody contracts a disease or cancer.

And then as the children leave, there is also sometimes facing the guilt of parental failure. You see the way some of your kids have grown up and you're happy about it, but then you take a look at some of the other kids and you're not as happy about what happened and you wonder to yourself, "Well, is this because of the way that I brought them up?

Is that the reason why they're dealing with life the way that they're dealing with life and they're struggling with things? Is it my fault? Could I have done something different or better? Did I disobey God in some area where my kids now are now rebellious?" We'll eventually talk about that, especially in reference to Proverbs 22.6.

Then there are pressures of taking care of aging or dying parents. Usually as the kids move out, the parents move in. The elderly parents, that's usually what happens. Maybe a wife's father or mother passes away and so they end up taking the remaining parent into their home. Or the husband's, one of their parents, his parents passes away and they end up taking one of them into the home, which brings a lot of additional strain and responsibility.

And now where previously in your life, you really relied upon them and looked up to them, you were their child, now it's almost as if they're the children and you're the parent and you find yourself taking over for a lot of just health and daily maintenance of food. If the parents get senile or experience Alzheimer's disease, where the brain begins to deteriorate and they don't even remember who you are and they don't even reappreciate you anymore, but you have responsibility for their daily care.

This can bring a lot of stress on a home and a lot of stress on a marriage when that kind of thing happens. And usually because the husband's still working, whatever the parents, whether it's the husband's parent or whether the wife's parent, it's usually the wife that ends up being the caretaker of the parents.

She's the one that usually does that. And when that happens, this is not what she envisioned the last part of her life to look like, taking care of parents for the rest of them. She loves them. She's grateful for them. It may be easier for her to take care of her parents, but it's much more difficult to take care of his parents.

Or if you bring parents into the home, then there's an additional strain of the fact that maybe those parents are not believers. And that brings a whole new dimension in the home. Maybe they cuss or they drink or they have some kind of habit that you're not used to and they're so old, they don't want to break their habit.

And so this becomes a difficult thing. And then it's the pressure of the child who doesn't marry or stays or returns home. And a lot of this is happening now. Statistics confirm the fact in European-American homes, there is a, children are waiting longer and longer to marry, well into their 30s before they get married.

Some as late as the 40s in order to get married. So what happens when a kid goes off to college, is gone, and then comes home, doesn't marry, decides to live at home? What do you do? You let that kid live at home? So there's a lot of decision-making that mom and dad has to go through at that particular time.

And you're going to be counseling people that'll be going through those kinds of decision-making processes. Then we get to the sixth life cycle, which is the empty nest family. Somewhere between the ages of 46 and 65, there is that empty nest. And there's a lot of things that are going on developmentally here, learning to live as a couple again, just the two of you learning to be grandparents, which on the one hand is a lot of joy, but on the other hand also represents some brand new challenges.

From the grandparents' point of view, maybe you're not really fond of the way that your kids are raising your grandkids. You see some dangerous things going on in how they're handling their kids. You're also preparing for retirement, not because you want to retire. Very few people really do if they're happy in their job.

If they're not happy in their job and they're really looking forward to getting out of it. But if they're happy in their job, very few people really want to retire, but they realize that physically they can't keep this up forever. They can't. They just can't do it anymore. And then they learn to relate to their children as adults there, and they help and relate honorably to aging parents.

They're handling aloneness as well, being alone. What do you do spending time alone? Sometimes with just the two of you, but also at this particular stage, frequently a husband or a wife will pass away. Usually it's the husband. And now the wife is spending time by herself a lot.

What do you do with that as a widow, or if you're a widower? Or you're handling physical deterioration. You find yourself going to the doctor a lot more, and the doctor wanting you to come back a lot more. And they want to put you through special tests and special treatments, and all of those things require more money and more money and more money.

You're learning to communicate differently than you did before. When the kids were around the home, you sort of adopted baby language. Well, the kids are gone. They're out on their own. They're creating their own babies. And now it's kind of ridiculous that you talk baby language to each other just for the kid's sake.

So you're learning how to communicate differently with one another. You're developing new goals and purposes also for living. Now at this particular stage also, there is a whole set of unique strains and temptations, and this is not an exhaustive list, but for example, the death of parents, that's a unique strain.

When parents die, there's this big void that occur in life, and you realize you're not going to see this on this earth. It makes it much easier to know that if they're believers and they've committed their life to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, that you'll see them again in glory.

That's a great reassurance. But what if you have parents that are not or you're unsure of? You don't know whether you'll ever see them again. So that's a stress. That's a difficulty. There's the death of close friends too, which puts you in contact with your own finiteness. Man, this is my close friend.

We grew up together. We knew each other, and this person's gone. You don't expect that. The people that you've known for a long, long time are not the people that are around anymore. Unfulfilled tasks again or undone tasks. Stuff that you like to have accomplished by this stage of your life but you haven't accomplished.

There's dissatisfaction with the job again that tends to reign at this particular stage. You're not happy with it. You want to do something different. You feel that your life can be more meaningful serving Christ in some other way. Or you're failing health, or there's health concerns that you have.

Maybe you have a chronic disease and it bothers you. Or there's the death of your mate at this stage, which is probably the most traumatic of all events that can happen in your lifetime, to lose somebody that you've been so close to for so many years. And most people, when that happens, it's very difficult for them to live above that, even though their mate was a believer and they know that they'll see their mate again.

It's very difficult for them with the remaining days they have to live above that. The tendency is to begin to do what Ecclesiastes 7.10 warns about. That is, we have a tendency to begin to live in the past in our mind. And we begin to rehearse all the wonderful things of the past as if there's nothing in the present that can ever be wonderful again because the person that I love is gone.

And when you're counseling people like this, widows and widowers, this is something that you need to be aware of. People who spend all day long living nostalgically, living in the past. My kids used to talk with me about that because when the kids were young, I used to drag them around to battlefields, Civil War battlefields.

That's what we would do on our vacations. I used to love that kind of stuff. I bore my family silly with that stuff. But I'd drag them along from one battlefield to another battlefield, explain to them what happened here and who were the major parties that were going on at this particular time, how this shaped the course of history and what happened.

And they'd always raise their hand and say, "Dad, when are we going to get ice cream?" So that's the way I'd bribe them. I'd say, "Okay, we're going to go visit -- and then we're going to go get ice cream, okay?" That's the way I'd bribe them with that.

But you've got -- when you're -- my kids used to accuse me of living in the past because I'd spend all those times talking about all those battles. Well that's what can happen sometimes with -- when you've lost a spouse. You can spend all of your time just living in the past and just dwelling there and so much that you become absolutely valueless in the present.

Death of a spouse. There's financial concerns as well this age. Are we going to have enough to make it through the rest of our life even if I can't function in my job anymore and bring home a paycheck? Is that possible? Have we saved enough? Maybe we haven't. What if we retire and then suddenly one of us is diagnosed with some kind of life-threatening disease that's going to require years of work and therapy and hundreds of thousands of dollars that will just drain whatever little bit of retirement that we have to -- you know, all of these things are going through their mind.

These are pressures you need to know about if you're going to counsel people at this stage of life. They have sexual difficulties at this stage, too. That's the reason why all these drugs have been developed to help people at this particular stage of life still have sexual desires. Ecclesiastes talks about that.

You know that? Grab your Bible just for a moment. Let's go over to Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes chapter 12. It talks about -- it's a whole description of growing old. And here, in verse 3, it says, "In the day when the watchmen of the house tremble," all of this is just poetic Hebrew idioms for growing old.

The watchmen of the house tremble, that's when your arms get weak. And the mighty ones stoop, your legs get weak. And the grinding ones stand idle because there are few. You lose your teeth, all right? You go around talking like this, all right, and you're back to baby food again.

And those who look through the windows grow dim, your eyesight goes bad. Verse 4, "And the doors of the street are shut at the sound of grinding -- of the grinding mill is low." Your ears start to go bad. And one will rise at the sound of the bird.

You don't sleep as deep anymore. In all, the daughter's song will sing softly. You don't hear distinctive sounds as well anymore. Your ability to hear is not as distinctive as it used to be. Verse 5, "Men are afraid of high places and the tears of the road." Boy, that's true.

In our household, we've got a set of stairs, a pretty fairly steep set of stairs. And I remember when the kids were younger, I could hear the kids going, "Brrr," down the stairs. "Brrr," up the stairs. And they still do that as college kids, "Brrr," down the stairs. And I can remember when I was young, I used to do that too.

Now when I get to the top of the stairs, I look down, I go, "Wow, that's a long ways down." And then the almond tree blossoms, the almond tree blossoms. If you go to Israel during the springtime when the almond trees are blossoming, there's a real pale pink blossom that appears on the trees, and these almond trees are all over the place, and it almost as if the hills turn white, almost looks like snow.

Well, that's what happens. Your hair turns white. The almond tree blossoms. The grasshopper drags himself along, you become a cripple. And then he says, "And the caperberry is ineffective." What is that? The caperberry is ineffective. Well, if you study this, it was believed in the ancient world that the caperberry was, in a sense, ancient Viagra.

It was supposed to help your sexual desire. But it doesn't even work anymore. The caperberry is ineffective. For man then goes to his eternal home while mourners go around in the street. So that's what it's like, and that's very realistic. So at this particular stage, there's usually a lot of sexual difficulties.

And then there is this handling of disappointment that's caused by the children who reject your values or standards or your faith commitments. And there's several different ways that this can flesh itself out. Maybe they totally reject the Lord, and they walk away and declare themselves to be atheist. Or maybe they reject your church, and they go off and they begin attending another church, a church that you don't believe is really doctrinally sound, but they attend some other church.

Who knows what the influence may be? It could be a million things, or who knows what they're thinking. So how do you handle that? The disappointment that's there. How do you treat your kids when you think that they are attending a bad congregation or not very good one, at least?

You'll get people come in and ask you all kinds of questions like that as a pastor. "What am I supposed to do with these kids? This is not the way that I reared them." Which then brings us to our seventh life cycle. And this is in later life. Retirement, 65 years of age and up, although people are retiring older and older now, primarily because of finances, primarily because of the stock market.

They've lost a lot of their retirement in the stock market. So they're staying in the workforce longer. There are developmental tasks here, like adjusting to big changes in lifestyle now that they're retired. They're no longer going to work on a regular basis, so there's a general slowdown in life.

They're adjusting to the sale of the family home and moving to a new place. What was really good as a family home, like a home with a set of stairs and bedrooms upstairs now, they can't navigate those any longer. So you need something that's much smaller, something that can be cleaned much more easily.

So you've got to sell the home and get into a smaller place. So you're adjusting to that. You're adjusting then to loss of a mate, the struggles there. You're trying to figure out a satisfactory use of spare time. One of the marvelous ministries that Grace to You has is usually during the week they have retired folks come out and work on mailings, and they offer themselves for a full day working on mailings to mail things out to people that have ordered things there from Grace to You, and these retirees come in and do that.

And then Grace to You gives them a free lunch, and they just have a ball up there. If you ever go up there and watch that, it's great. Lots of fellowship with one another. They're doing something useful for the kingdom of God and having some kind of ministry. I think one of the greatest untapped resources in the church today are our retirees.

I mean, you know how much work and how much wisdom you could bring to ministry by bringing them in and finding things for them to do that would be useful for the kingdom of God. But so there's a satisfactory use of leisure time and spare time. And then there's adjusting to illness and frailty.

Their ability to be able to navigate things, get around, is much more limited than it was before. They also are adjusting to the fact that they are in a subculture status. And you know, you can see this in a lot of churches today, especially the way the young people treat some of the elderly.

Young people go running through hallways and almost run them down and act like they're not there. I remember as a pastor at one particular point in our church, I had to get up on a Sunday morning and admonish parents to teach their kids how to act at church so they didn't run our senior saints down in the hallways because they'll do that.

They'll run them down. They'll be walking down the hallway as a cane and some kid will go zipping past them like without a thought in the world and knock somebody over. And we had it happen on a couple occasions when that occurred. And the parents have got to step in there and teach their kids how to act in church.

So this is part of that subculture status. Have you ever noticed that at the church where you attend, how the senior saints are treated, it's almost as if in most churches today they don't exist. It's almost like they don't exist. Oh, they're there and occasionally there'll be an acknowledgment of them, but it's like they're not there and they know it.

They know how people treat them. Back in Dayton, Ohio, there is a large church there that one day the pastor got up and the emphasis of that particular church is on the youth. Got up on Sunday morning, I can't believe, I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't heard it with my own ears because they have a television broadcast too, and said, "Listen, if you are over 35 years of age, you better look for another church because our church isn't for you." I thought to myself, "My goodness sakes." In other words, we're going to restrict our ministry to a certain age group.

That's horrible. That's horrible. You see, I think that that's exactly what's being communicated to people that are widows, widowers, retirees in the church today. They're basically subculture status, and yet I think they're one of the more greatest resources the church has. Of all the people that have freedom and the wisdom and probably a lot of skills that a church could use, they're the ones.

Then there's learning new ways of contributing to the world and to the church, which follows right out of that last one. Learning new ways to contribute to the world and to the church. That may be very difficult for people to make that transition, especially at this particular stage of life, and then also accepting new roles in each other's lives.

You become each other's caretakers. A husband and a wife become real caretakers with one another. We had a dear, dear couple. God has since promoted them to heaven in our church years ago. I'll never forget them. Their names were Delbert and Evelyn Lakes, dear, dear couple. One day, Evelyn called me and said, "Pastor," she says, "I have been experiencing horrible depression.

I've never had any experience like this before in my life, and I don't know why." She says, "I've even thought that this was some kind of demonic activity that's going on." Now, when Evelyn says that, I'm starting to really take this seriously, and I'm going, "Oh, we need to sit down and talk, Evelyn.

Why don't you and Delbert come in in the evening, and we'll sit down and talk about this, and we'll seek God's answers for these problems?" So one of the things that I did was I had Evelyn write out all the medications that she was taking. We had our first counseling appointment together.

I asked her a lot of questions about what was going on. We had a lot of prayer over it. We took her to several scriptures that pointed to hope, and in the meantime, she had given me this list of all the medications that she was on, and one of them was a beta blocker for her heart.

And so I always have a PDR, a Physician's Desk Reference, handy where I can look up the side effects and all the medications. And so I looked up the side effects of the medication, and I found out that at the very top of the list, the very top of the list of this particular beta blocker for her heart was severe depression, bold letters.

I'm going, "Hmm." So I'm on the phone five minutes later, and I'm calling Evelyn. I say, "Hey, Evelyn, when your doctor prescribed this particular beta blocker for your heart, did he tell you that one of the side effects is severe depression?" "No," she said. "Well, I think you need to call your doctor back, and I think you need to tell him that you're experiencing severe depression, and you think it's closely associated with this beta blocker." And sure enough, she had started experiencing her depression within the past two months, and it was about two and a half months ago that she had started on this beta blocker.

She called her doctor up. The doctor said, "No problem. We can put you on something else." He put her on something else. Depression went away. Didn't have the depression anymore. So that wasn't a spiritual issue after all. It was actually a medical issue. That she would have gone on thinking that she was experiencing some kind of demonic attack in her life or some kind of severe spiritual deficiency in her life if we hadn't found out that this was actually a medication issue that was going on in her life.

And this was all new to her because she was getting older. Her heart was frail. And so they were trying to keep her alive as long as possible and trying to give her the medications in order to do so. But that's a dear, dear, you know, you'll have this in your pastoral life.

There are people that you really look forward to seeing in heaven, you know. And Delbert and Evelyn Lakes are that couple, that kind of couple. Those kind of people that I look forward to seeing in heaven someday. All right. So this particular stage also brings with it certain stresses and temptations here.

Like my little picture there. Grandpa and grandma giving each other a big schmooch. So well, of course, financial. Because neither of them are usually working at this particular stage full time. They may have a part-time job. Sometimes I jokingly say to my wife, my goal in life is to become a Walmart greeter.

They may have a part-time job like that. Like a Walmart greeter. Somebody greets somebody at the entrance of the store. She just rolls her eyes. Or there's a serious illness of one's -- there's just general declining health. So you realize that you spend a lot of your time just addressing health issues.

Health issues. My father passed away several years ago. He was a pastor all my life, but he passed away back in 1985 of leukemia. And my mom continued to work and for a time after her retirement she stayed with my sister and her husband. And then she remarried. In fact, it's really funny, my mother remarried a guy that she knew in college.

They had not seen each other for 50 years. And out of the clear blue sky, he called her after his wife had died. His wife had died a year or two before. And he remembered her, something had brought her to mind, and so he tracked her down and called her.

It turned out my father was gone, too, and they struck up this relationship. My mother lived in Spokane, Washington, and this guy lived in Beaver Creek, Ohio. So clear cross country, and they struck up this relationship on the phone and eventually married and I got to do their wedding.

I got to do my own mother's wedding. Isn't that great? How many people get to do that? I told my mom at the beginning of the wedding ceremony, I said to her, "You know, Mom, I got to ask you to forgive me." And she looked at me really funny, said, "I wasn't able to be at your first wedding, but I wasn't going to miss this one." She just rolled her eyes, too, and we went on with the marriage ceremony.

The audience seemed to like it, though. So anyhow, my mother remarried, and her new husband's a wonderful Christian man, really loves her, and they love each other, and they're spending their senior years together. His name is Ray, Ray Enting, and one of the things they found out about his health insurance was that it covered eye problems.

And my mother, it turned out, had some pretty serious cataracts on her eyes, and she used to tell the story on how the kitchen sink there at their house, she would scrub and scrub and scrub that, you've got to know my mom in order to really appreciate this, scrub it, but she could never get that kitchen sink white until she had her cataracts removed, and they were white.

They were always really yellow. And it seems like one thing after another, as the two of them grow older, there's one physical problem after another that occurs that's going on there like that, and this is this age. This is, there's a general decline in health and struggles that they're going to face.

There's unfulfilled tasks, too, especially because they don't have the physical ability to get everything done, and they don't have the money to pay anybody else to do it. So usually they have to rely upon family to come in and do some of those homebound tasks, and if the family can't do it, it just doesn't get done.

And here's another thing, now when you add this up, there's a lot of time on their hands, and there's not a whole lot to do that's really constructive or to keep their mind occupied. They can do a lot of reading, a lot of Bible reading, that kind of stuff, and that's good, but beyond that, there's not a whole lot of things that they can occupy themselves with.

When you combine those two things together, there's a lot of room for remorse and guilt, and usually when you're working with someone at this particular stage, this is something that you encounter, or a couple. Maybe it's the way in which they raise their children, maybe it's over some past deed in their life, something that they neglected to do, or something that they did that they wished they had never done.

I have a little ER clip from Emergency Room, which is a television program, and on that ER clip, it's actually a medical doctor that's dying of cancer. He's in the hospital dying of cancer, and he tells a story. As he's dying of cancer, this hospital therapist comes in to try to help him because he's full of all kinds of guilt as he thinks back across his life, and one of the things that really bugs him is the fact that years before when he was a new young doctor, a young man was brought in accused of a horrendous crime of murder, and he had a choice as a young doctor on whether to do a rather complicated procedure on him in order to save the young man or not do the complicated procedure, and he chose because the man was accused of this horrendous crime to let him die, only to find out a week after the kid died that the kid was innocent.

He did not do the crime that he had been accused of doing, and now this guy, this old man, this old medical doctor is dying, and this thing is still weighing on his conscience, and he has this hospital therapist, this woman who's attempting to try to help him, but everything that she tries to say doesn't help at all because she really doesn't have any real answers, and he's saying to her, "Listen, can I have forgiveness for sins?

Is there any kind of atonement for sin?" And she can't give him a straight answer on that, and so it's a very dramatic time, but that's a beautiful picture of what you'll face in counseling people that are elderly, and there are things that have occurred or that they've done that's a part of their past that they really regret, and you can help them with that, and you can help them understand what Romans 8:1 says, "There is therefore now no condemnation of those that are in Christ Jesus," right?

You can help them understand that and the forgiveness that it can have in Christ because of the things that have occurred in the past. Let me share one other thing about that. I remember several years ago when I visited a home of a family that had just begun attending our church.

It was an older couple, and the wife had begun attending. Rarely would the husband come to church, but he did occasionally, and so I had a chance to go visit them in their home and share the gospel. Turned out the wife was genuinely a believer, the husband was not, and I finally got down to brass tacks with the guy.

The guy had been through World War II, and finally, when we got down and he realized that I was just trying to help him, and he was a pretty clear-thinking guy, he began to say, "But you don't understand what I've done. You don't understand what I did during the war." And I said, "Well, you know what?

I don't need to know what it is. It's between you and God, but I don't think that there is any kind of sin that's unforgivable, except for a sin would be like blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, that is, attributing to the Holy Spirit things that would only be attributed to Satan." And I gave illustrations of that from Scripture, in terms of people that were murderous, that couldn't be forgiven.

The Apostle Paul himself was a murderer, and I can remember the tears in his eyes, because he had basically lived with these crimes. Some of them he shared with me, and I think in the face of the struggle of war and battle, there's a part of me that understands why he did what he did, but it wasn't necessary what he did, in terms of taking people's lives.

So I understand his guilt that he carried all of his life, but to see God forgive that guy and lift his guilt, you see, he had carried that all of his life, right into his retirement age. And you're going to face people like that all the time. So they're going to have a lot of remorse, a lot of guilt.

And then there's going to be concerns about the future. They realize they don't have a lot of time on earth, but they wonder, one of the biggest things, probably right at the top of the list is, "Am I going to have enough resources in order to make it to the end?

Or am I going to have to rely upon my family? I don't want to be a stress and strain upon my family," they'll say to you. Well, if that's what has to be, then it has to be. And then if the family can't help, then the church needs to move in.

1 Timothy is clear about that. So they're concerned about the future. They're concerned about losing each other. Since they've been together for so long, my grandparents celebrated 70 years of marriage. 70 years. Of course, they were married in the hills of Tennessee when she was 13 and he was 14.

Don't do that anymore, huh? Some of you would be married for 15 years by now, wouldn't you? So, but they celebrated 70 years of marriage and I remember their anniversary party and they were both still functioning, but by 75, both of them, God had eventually taken both of them home.

So what's their concerns about the future? And then usually, as time goes on and they don't think as well, confusion sets in and with confusion, right on the heels of that will come discouragement. Some of you that have worked in retirement homes or senior homes before or maybe had ministries there know what I'm talking about.

You can go one week and the person will remember you and the next week they'll forget who you are. They're confused about you and they sit around and the only thing they have to think about is the kids and why aren't the kids calling us? Why aren't the kids visiting us?

What kind of decisions are the kids making? What are they doing now? That's all they have to think about and it's good in order to pay honor and respect to father and mother to call them and to contact them and to visit them as much as possible. That's a good thing, but they can't babysit them all the time.

They've got their own lives to live and they have their own responsibilities. They can't do that and sometimes some of those expectations really become unreasonable expectations, but why is that? Because they have a lot of time on their hands and they're not sure exactly what to do with all that time.

And you have the capacity as a pastor to step into that void, so to speak, and help them be creative and beneficial to the kingdom of God and even to your church for that time that they have on their hands. There's certain gifts and abilities that those people have.

Some of them are musical, some of them are very practical in terms of there are families that are maybe poor families in your church, and the husband happens to be quite handy, plumbing, or carpentry, and you say, "You know, you can go and have a ministry over here to the Jones family and repair some things at their home," and wow, all of a sudden now they're really, the body of Christ is now ministering to other members of the body of Christ.

And the Jones family ends up inviting Grandpa and Grandma over for dinner, and they have a great time, and their kids end up adopting Grandpa and Grandma, and Grandma ends up doing a lot of sewing projects for Mrs. Jones, and this just goes on and on and on and on.

Those kind of things happen. And that's where you've got that inter-gender thing going on in the church that I think is very, very beneficial. But like I said in our last class sessions, most of the time when you go into a lot of churches all these Sunday school classes and stuff are divided up into age groups, and very little inter-gender mixture ever takes place.

And it's almost as if we take the old folks and we kind of set them off in this class over here, and then all the other really active classes are over here, and we don't realize how much we could benefit from them just as much as they can benefit from us in terms of personal ministry.

So now why do we go through all these life cycles? Because I want you to understand that when you're sitting in front of a couple, I want you to be thinking about what is the unique stage of life that they're at. What temptations, strains, stresses are unique to that particular cycle?

And it will help you gather good data. It will help you to think through their problems. It will help you to understand why they've made some of the decisions that they've made, whether they're good decisions or bad decisions. It will really help you minister to them much more effectively.

Counseling then becomes really creative and very meaningful when you are able to have insights into where people are at. In fact, people will say to you in counseling, "How did you know that? When you asked me about this or you asked me about that, how did you know that?" Well, you can say, "You know, I was just thinking about other people who were at your particular stage of life and all the stresses and temptations that they go through.

I just kind of figured that this was the same thing that you'd be going through." Well, you know what? You're right. This is what's going on in our life right now. Help me, pastor. Do you have anything that you can say that will help me? Some Scripture deal with my loneliness or our financial struggles or my worry and concern about the future or our children.

Some of them have walked away from the Lord. What can we do to reach out to them? Or what am I going to do with all my spare time? I've got loads and loads of spare time. What am I going to do with that? Is there anything that you need that would be helpful to you here around the church?

What can I do? Well, you can help them out in this way. So all these unique family cycles reveal certain things about these people because of the stage that they're at and the unique, or I don't want to say unique, but the particular difficulties that people face at that particular stage of life are unique to everyone.

This just reinforces what 1 Corinthians 10:13 says. There's no temptation taking you except for what is common to man, right? You're not the first person to have gone through these stages and these temptations and difficulties. You're not. So it reinforces that kind of thing and it helps you address their problems.

Okay. Next week we're going to get back to analyzing and assessing why the family problems have developed and continued for such a long period of time. We'll talk about that a little bit more. So everybody have a good week. Yes, sir. How would you deal with a person of the kind you were just talking about and you made a number of good suggestions to them of how they could overcome their loneliness or to feel more useful in life, but they were not open to your ideas.

They just preferred to wallow in their loneliness and self-pity. How would you deal with that? The question is, how do you deal with a person who you give them a lot of suggestions and they're at this elderly stage of life in order to help them with that and they prefer to ignore the suggestions and continue to wallow in their self-pity and, well, one of the things that I like to help people with is this.

You may be alone, I tell them. You may be alone, but you choose to be lonely, okay? That's your choice. In other words, your husband or your wife may be gone, but you're the one who chooses to be lonely and you're the one who chooses to wallow in self-pity.

Now, if you want help, I'm going to give you some practical help, and that is, this is akin to what Hebrews 10, verse 24 and 25 says, "Don't forsake the assembling of yourselves together as some are in the habit of doing." But we're put here on this earth in order to stimulate one another on to faith and good deeds and you can actively do that.

You can be a great help to other members of the body of Christ with the gifts and abilities that God has given you, but don't complain about being lonely because that's your choice. Your circumstances may dictate that you're alone, but you choose to be lonely. You choose to feel lonely and you choose to act lonely.

So that's nothing but your choice. It's up to you to change. I want them to see that. Does that help you, Jim? Because I want to challenge... Sometimes people will bring this stuff to you because they want you to wallow with them in their self-pity. And I'm not going to do that.

I'm not going to do that. I'm going to sympathize with them and the difficulties that they're going through because they're alone. But I'm not going to wallow with them in self-pity. I'm going to challenge where they're at and say, "No, God has still given you life. That means that he has a purpose for your life and you can take that and you can misuse it or you can be a good steward of it and use it." And I've given you several suggestions on how you can be a good steward with your life and the breath that God's given you.

Don't choose to be lonely, even though you're alone. Instead, choose to be beneficial to other people. Choose to love them and care for them, even though you may not know them. You can be a great benefit. And they end up having a lot of fun doing it. I mean, how many times can that be reproduced about sending grandpa and grandma over to the Joneses?

I mean, eventually, grandpa starts helping the Joneses out practically and then grandma gets involved and then the Joneses have them over and then they adopt each other and they adopt them as grandpa and grandma and just one thing leads to another and, wow, this is all plus, plus, plus on all sides.

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