“You normally have to fail through some form of transgression or humiliation or defeat (the necessary suffering). Then you can look to some elders, some wiser people in your circle of friends or to a book if you don’t have friends who know how to guide you across the transition and into the second half of life.
[M]ost of our concern in the first half of life is about rising, achieving, accomplishing, performing … there is a necessary falling that comes into every life. It’s not like you have to manufacture or create the falling; it will happen.” — Richard Rohr on ‘Falling Upward‘
This post has been a long time coming but as I turned 40 this year and catching glimpses of a light at the end of a dark spiritual tunnel, I now have some language (thanks to Fr Ronald Rolheiser and Richard Rohr, and of course John Mark Comer for introducing them) after almost seven very long years navigating “The Wall” in preparing to enter the second half.
It isn’t like I planned it other than I have come to a place where I feel a readiness to enter it.
Yes, it has taken me seven years to.
Between 2019 to 2025, my life fell apart spiritually, physically and emotionally. But as 2025 draws to an end, I can say ever confidently my life has come through “the dark night of the soul”. Well, very close. I do write this with a bit of terror for my faith to fully arise. This is a very difficult post to pen as it is language I did not have back in 2019 when it all started.
My soul battled; I owe it to His mercy and to myself the journey through the dark night. I have tried over the last seven years to document as much as possible while still in “the fog”. Especially the first half from 2019 to 2022 was like the end of the beginning, that is, the first half of my life. And the next half from 2023 was preparing the beginning of the end.
From the teachings and books I have come across, it was oft mentioned that navigating the first to second half transition well or at all in this “halftime” is quite rare as it brings to the world a distinctive kind of human flourishing and joy on the other side.
“You can recognize a second half of life person is by a kind of inner outpouring, a kind of inner generativity. They’re not guarded. They’re not overly self-protected. They’re looking for ways to give themselves away, because they’re now living out of their abundance, and they find that it’s an overflowing wealth.” — Rohr
There were two things I was concurrently navigating: one was the spiritual realm (faith de- and re-construction) and the other, the natural realm (physical, relational and emotional healing). They overlap but are also distinctive navigations. In both, there were forgiveness and grief, healthy detachment, deeper surrender, and a life orientation towards the quiet.
In effect, the transition cannot be taught but it lands like a whisper in your ear when you are ready to fully embrace the disorientation that often stems from deep disappointments, profound disillusionment, unexpected crisis or loss, chronic escapism or helplessness and it was for me such a destabilizing time that I felt such a deep longing to find or return ‘home’.
After a spiritually traumatic episode with a global faith-based NGO in 2021, I left church completely in 2022 and deconstructed my faith in the dark night. In battling with chronic gallbladder attacks while caring for two little ones two and under, and watching my partner began to bizarrely emotionally detached and dissociated despite at the peak of his ‘success’.
So at 37, I had to choose to stop resisting, and allow myself to freefall upward into the fire.
Physical healing had turned out to be the easiest: I elected surgery to remove my gallbladder and built a village to support with kids. Then, it was all-in spiritual and emotional health.
THE JOURNEY
In November 2022, a soul sister in San Francisco who sensed my dark night, sent me a series of podcasts by John Mark Comer: “Naming Your Stage of Apprenticeship“. (The wildest part was this was released in 2019 at the same time I stumbled into the dark.) I started reading books by Fr Ronald Rolheiser (‘Sacred Fire’, ‘The Restless Heart‘).
By 2023, after my surgery I was led to return to a new church, Reality SF, committed to an orthodox expression of faith (some call it deconstruction from traditional evangelical faith) similar to Bridgetown in Portland and Church of the city New York. The Lord brought me to work at a Jesuit University that was a gentle re-taste of a soul fully integrated at work.
By 2024, I had gained curiosity in building alternative spiritual communities, and was part of an inner city missions discipleship group in San Francisco (where we did Practicing The Way’s rule of life and read books together like ‘Sabbath‘, ‘Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools‘). Then I signed up for Missional Labs to establish for myself a missional community globally and be equipped in redemptive missional imagination I felt the Lord moving into.
This was all for me a critical departure from the missional framework of my first half. That 2020 had ushered in an ‘end’ of both the local church planting models and global missions movements of an era as my spirit sensed the beginning of a prophetic shift.
By 2025, I engaged a spiritual director through Soul Care Seattle that is known for faith de- and re-construction journeys. I fell deeply in love with a Henri Nouwen book. I would also graduate from Biola, where I had spent the last 4 years researching-studying theology and integrating with business graduate studies. (It is a good way to be forced to read a lot!)
Along the way, I also started to identify specific areas to de- and re-construct ranging from Christian Nationalism to Complementarianism. I have found a deep connection and joy in listening, reading writings and memoirs of bold female authors Beth Moore, Beth Allison Barr, Kaitlyn Schiess, April Ajoy, and Oxford-based Amy Orr-Ewing whom I got to meet.
“You’ve learned to see the soul, and once you see the soul, you see it’s evenly distributed, and you don’t look at externals. Lots of people who are still in the first half of life will say you’re a heretic or disloyal or rebellious or unfaithful, but you are thick skinned enough that those criticisms don’t deter you from what you know you have to do, what you know you have to be.” — Rohr
I have another post on my deconstruction that takes the lens of navigating what I sense the Lord is up to with the Church, and a vulnerable personal year-end post sharing the new in my life. Know that every journey of deconstruction and navigation to the second half will be different and unique to your own, but all the same, it will be laced in His tender mercy.
It will feel like a freefall on your own, but those who took that journey through the other side of the dark night will tell you, your internal world will be revolutionized in profound peace, love and joy, with a faith more cautiously robust and refreshed for the second half.
May you too find your brave, and fall, to be truly free.
honest & hygge 