I once asked a widower in his late seventies to walk me through an ordinary Tuesday. He got up at five-thirty, because he had gotten up at five-thirty for fifty-one years. He read the paper. He drove to the same breakfast place and sat at the booth, where the waitress knew his order and asked about his knee. He stopped at Home Depot, where he did not really need anything. He was home by ten. Then he said something I have thought about ever since.

“From ten in the morning until I go to bed, if the phone doesn’t ring, nobody knows whether I’m alive.”

He was not depressed, and he would have been offended by the word lonely. He was a competent, dignified man with three grown children who loved him and called regularly. He had simply arrived, without ever deciding to, at a life in which no one was expecting him anywhere.

That is the shape isolation usually takes in this season. There is rarely a dramatic estrangement. There is a slow thinning — until the week has no one left in it who would notice a change.

The headwind everyone is flying into

If you find yourself with fewer close friends than you once had, the first thing worth saying is that you are not a failure. Some of the reasons are cultural, and it helps to name them so you stop blaming yourself for a headwind everyone is flying into.

Careers scattered us across the country, and then our children’s careers scattered them further. We largely stopped joining things — the service clubs, lodges, leagues, and choirs where earlier generations rubbed shoulders week after week have thinned dramatically, and friendship used to come almost free with membership. Screens deliver the feeling of connection while quietly starving us of the substance. Then retirement removes the last social scaffold most of us had: work handed you people. You never had to plan a thing.

But the culture is only half of it. Some of the walls are built with our own hands. There is the wall of self-sufficiency: if you spent forty years being the one everyone leaned on, needing people can feel like a demotion. There is the fear of being a burden, which sounds humble, functions as a prison, and quietly insults your friends by assuming they would rather be undisturbed than needed. There are old wounds, and a guardedness that felt like wisdom the year you were burned and has cost you more every year since.

And for many men there is a particular problem: friendships were all shoulder-to-shoulder, built around a job or a team or a project, so that when the activity goes you discover you have golf partners and acquaintances and nobody who knows what you are afraid of.

Underneath all of it runs one quiet lie: it is too late, everyone my age already has their people, that window closed years ago. That lie is false, and it is self-fulfilling if you believe it.

What a friend can actually do

Think about what a few trusted friends can do for us. Emotionally, a friend gives sorrow somewhere to go. There is a strange arithmetic to grief: spoken aloud to a safe person, it weighs less. The loss is still the loss, but you are no longer carrying it in the dark, rehearsing it alone at two in the morning.

We also do not see ourselves clearly — we never have. “As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend” (Proverbs 27:17), and some of the sharpening only happens across a table, when someone who loves you says, “Can I push back on that?” The writer of Hebrews tells us to encourage one another daily so that none of us is hardened by sin’s deceitfulness (Hebrews 3:13). Notice the assumption underneath that command: left to ourselves, we drift and we harden. Sanctification was never meant to be a solo project.

It turns out our bodies know all of this. The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic and compared its mortality effects to smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day. Isolation at our age is not just emotionally painful. It is medically dangerous. God wired connection into our cells.

Jesus told his disciples, “No longer do I call you servants... but I have called you friends” (John 15:15). That still astonishes me. The Lord of glory chose friendship as the word for what he wanted with us.

The craft of listening

The old proverb holds: the way to have a friend is to be one. And the single greatest skill of a good friend — rarer now than ever, and therefore more precious — is listening.

David Brooks, in How to Know a Person, observes that in any gathering of people you will find two kinds: “Diminishers,” who treat others as background characters in their own drama, and “Illuminators,” whose curiosity and attention make people feel bigger, seen, and understood. Most of us think we are better listeners than we are. The reason: once you are in response mode, your ability to listen deteriorates. You know exactly what he means, because you have sat across from that person — the one who is merely reloading while you talk.

So practice the craft. Ask real questions and then ask the follow-up question, which is where the gold is. “How are you doing with all of it?” opens more doors than any advice will. Resist the urge to fix; most of the time your friend does not need your solution, he needs your attention. Keep confidences like a vault, because one leak can undo twenty years of trust.

Show up at the hard moments — the funeral, the waiting room, the week after the diagnosis — and do not worry about having the right words. When Job’s three friends heard the news, they came and sat with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights, and no one said anything, because they saw how great his suffering was. For one week, they got it exactly right. Presence carries what eloquence cannot.

How to actually build a friendship at this age

Late friendship is almost never built on chemistry. It is built on proximity and repetition — showing up to the same room, at the same hour, week after week, until the people there stop being strangers. The men’s breakfast you find tedious. The Tuesday class you could take or leave. Go anyway, go for a year, and see who is still there.

And then the part that costs something. It is far easier at our age to be the one who advises than the one who is known. Advice keeps you upright and useful; it also keeps you at a safe distance. If you want a real friend, you will have to let someone see you struggling, and you will probably have to ask for help with something you would rather manage alone. Receiving is what makes a friendship, not giving.

Think of a name. Who would wade in after you — and whose river would you wade into? If a name comes, thank God for it, and tell him so this week. Men of our generation assume the people we love know it. They do not.

If the honest answer is that no name comes — that you hesitated — you are not alone, and you are not a failure. You are simply standing at a place where the work of the next season begins. God never designed you to make this descent alone. And some of the deepest friendships of your life can still be ahead of you.

The Higher Mountain: Christ’s Call in the Last Great Season of Life is available on Amazon.

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A friend of mine (we’ll call him Walt) ran a manufacturing plant. Eleven hundred employees at its peak and a name people recognized in the industry. In retirement, when Walt and his wife moved to be near their daughter, he joined a local church of four hundred people and signed up for the parking team, because that was what they needed. For two years he stood in a reflective vest on Sunday mornings, waving cars into rows.

He told me the parking was fine. He liked being outside, and he liked the people he served with. What undid him was the coffee afterward — standing in a room full of people who were perfectly kind to him and had no idea who he was. Someone would ask what he used to do, and he would hear himself starting to give the whole résumé — the plant, the turnaround in ‘05, the year on the industry board — and he would stop halfway through, embarrassed, and say, “Manufacturing.” Then the conversation would move on.

“I didn’t know how much of me was in that answer,” he said, “until nobody wanted it.”

Notice what Walt had not lost. He had his health, his marriage, his savings, and his faith. He had not lost anything a financial planner would put on a statement. What he had lost was the thing that had been telling him who he was for forty years — and nobody had ever warned him it was on loan.

The mirror changes

Most people approach retirement with practical questions: How much money will I need? Where will I live? What will I do with my time? Those questions matter. But they are not the deepest questions.

The deeper question is this: What is my life for now?

For decades, the world reflected back a clear answer. You were the leader, the parent, the provider, the organizer, the expert, the one people called. Then the mirror changes. The invitations slow down. The phone rings less. The calendar, once so crowded it felt like a burden, goes quiet in a way that turns out to be its own kind of burden.

This is not a practical problem. It is a spiritual one.

The first mountain of life (the mountain of achievement, career, responsibility, competence, and results) gave us so much good: work, useful labor, people who depended on us, and the satisfaction of having built something. But one of its quiet dangers is that we begin to believe we are what we accomplish. The career becomes the identity. The usefulness becomes the justification for being alive.

When the career ends, the identity wobbles. And a man who has spent forty years being the one everyone leaned on is not prepared to lean.

The moving summit

Another friend spent his career in commercial real estate and set himself a number at thirty-four. When he reached it at forty-nine, he did not celebrate. He told me he felt a kind of vertigo, and within a month he had a new number, roughly double the first. He reached that one too.

He is sixty-six now. When I asked him last year what the current number was, he laughed and said he had stopped setting them. Then he said, more quietly, that he was not sure he had ever actually enjoyed a single one of them. “The day after,” he said, “it is just the new normal. You look around and everybody at that level has more.”

He is not a greedy man. He gives generously. He has been faithful to his wife for forty years. He had simply been running a race whose finish line moved every time he approached it — and he ran it for thirty years before it occurred to him to ask who had drawn the line.

This is the tyranny of the first mountain. Not just that the summit is never enough. But that we never stop long enough to ask whether it was the right mountain.

What Ecclesiastes knows

If there is one book of the Bible that refuses sentimentality, it is Ecclesiastes. Again and again, it tells us that life “under the sun” is vanity — vapor: temporary, elusive, and impossible to control. That truth lands differently in later life. When we are young, we can imagine that achievement, reputation, money, or career will finally settle the soul. In the last great season, those illusions become harder to maintain.

But Ecclesiastes is not calling us to gloom. It is calling us to clarity. And clarity frees us to receive life with gratitude. “So I decided there is nothing better than to enjoy food and drink and to find satisfaction in work. Then I realized that these pleasures are from the hand of God” (Eccl. 2:24). Simple daily pleasures. The table. The walk. The conversation. The grandchild who falls asleep on your shoulder.

The book ends with a sober and stirring call: remember your Creator while you still have breath. Not to despise this fleeting life, but to receive it wisely, enjoy it gratefully, and offer it back to God before the vapor disappears.

The question beneath the question

Walt standing at the coffee hour is not a story about a man who needs to find a new title. It is a story about a man who needs a different foundation — one that was never built on what he produced.

The question retirement forces is not, How do I stay important? That question will make us anxious, defensive, and brittle. It is not even, How do I find a new project? That may help, but it is still too small.

The question is: What work is Christ calling me to faithfully do now?

That question assumes something Walt’s résumé never assumed — that life is received before it is achieved. That we are not creating meaning out of nothing but answering the One who made us, knows us, loves us, and sends us. That our deepest identity was given to us as a gift long before any career began, and will remain when every title is gone.

Walt had not lost himself. He had simply never known where the self was actually kept.

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Christ’s call is so grand, so sweeping. And my life is, well, so ordinary.

Take heart because, in the Kingdom of God, what doesn’t look like much from the outside can be expansive and beautiful within.

The most significant things in the world are often hidden from the public’s gaze. Your life - and mine - might be one of God’s hidden gems in this wonderful, terrible world.

This new substack lives in the territory between God’s call and his sending. In this space, we contemplate who we are and what we should do next. It the place of pause before action begins. Here, we ask ourselves fundamental questions. In light of who God is and how he was called me to himself, who am I now? In light of everything that I know about this world, what am I responsible for?

This newsletter is for ordinary people who want to take Jesus more seriously. Who truly want to think it all through. For those who want their lives to be meaningful, thoughtful, and deeply connected to Christ’s calling.

This newsletter grew out of a book that I’ve been writing for several months now. It’s called “The Higher Mountain: Christ’s Call in the Last Great Season of Life”. More about that later.

For now, I want to invite you along on a journey. Let’s think and pray our way to finding where God’s vision for the world and our deepest loves unite. We will look for hints of transcendence hidden behind small wonders. To be attentive. And to think hard about the implications of what we know to be deeply true.

I’d love for you to subscribe and help spread the word on social media. I want to hear from you too. Your thoughts and experiences will be an important part of this journey too. So please don’t be shy to share your thoughts in the comments.

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” — Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking

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