Midlife exposes what a person has really been living for and where a person has tried to find meaning and purpose. It has the power to reveal the significant gap between a person's confessional theology and their functional theology. What we say we are living for on Sunday may not, in fact, be the thing that has taken daily rulership over our hearts. And when these things which rule us are taken out of our hands, we tend to become angry, fearful, bitter or discouraged. We will experience a loss of identity and a flagging of meaning and purpose.
p.51
(I find this a facinating insight: from a Christian perspective then, the range of emotions that might come to us in midlife can actually be caused by the limitations of aging compromising the things we were really living for. It's showing us what was really at the centre, instead of Christ (because aging does not effect our ability to have a fulfilling life with Him; but it does, for example, stop us from feeling physically invincible, when our knees start to give out! So, to some degree our hope was actually just a teeny weeny bit, in being physically strong, in being a bloke (if you are a bloke that is). So my knees are helping to tear down idols, which means I can be stronger in the inner man even though the outer man perishes! This certainly, for me, adds another layer of meaning to 2 COR.4:16ff. It's just that "I'm being saved by my knees!" doesn't sound as cool as I hoped).
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