Fifty seemed old to me when I was there. Fifty was the first birthday that made me feel old - over the hill - and that was miserable. Then a friend reminded me of the year of Jubilee described in the Bible. Fifty didn't have to be such a bad time after all, I realized. I began looking at the Bible's description of Jubilee as I would look at a dream or a work of art, expressed in symbolic language.
Reclaiming lost parts of myself
When I looked at "the land" as a way of picturing a person's whole self, as it might be in a dream, I saw the fiftieth year as a time for recovering parts of myself that I had in effect allowed to be taken away from me or to be enslaved, either by other people's unreasonable demands and expectations or by my own. Fifty, I realized, was a time for reclaiming skills, talents, and interests that I had abandoned years earlier in order to follow the pattern that I had mistakenly thought God wanted all women to follow forever.
You shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all your land. You shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you. You shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family . ... You shall not sow, or reap the after growth, or harvest the unpruned vines . ... You shall eat only what the field itself produces . ... You shall not cheat one another, but you shall fear your God. -Leviticus 25:9-17
I saw fifty as a time to stop worrying about some of the "fields" that I'd been feeling responsible for. It was time to stop worrying about "unpruned vineyards" - things I maybe should have done but had not done.
I realized that I had sown a lot of good seeds, tended a lot of vines, and reaped good harvests. I saw that I needed to appreciate those accomplishments but not to continue all of them forever. I also saw that some of them had never been required.
Through the Jubilee scripture I felt God was saying to me, "Don't cheat or mistreat any parts of yourself. I love and accept them all. Dedicate this time of your life to letting the best and truest parts of yourself bear fruit."
How about you? Even if you have not yet reached your 50th birthday, do you have parts of yourself that need to leave behind? What are the best and truest parts of yourself that need to bear more fruit?
