During the challenges of mid-life — Along with the challenges of midlife come opportunities for perspective and a deepening awareness of the need to spread God’s Word in the world.

by Amy Gage | photography by Don Chambers

Marianne Zotti lost her home in Little Rock, Arkansas, to a tornado in 1997. Ten days later, her beloved husband died. And yet this committed Christian, who has been a Lutheran since she was a child, does ministry work in addition to a full-time career for one simple reason: “God has been so good to me.”

Her second husband, Hal Shope, feels he is similarly blessed. The former coordinator for the Children’s Health Insurance Program for Medicaid in Jackson, Mississippi, Shope, aged 63, now devotes himself to disaster ministry since the couple’s recent move to Lilburn, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. He helps people put their lives back together after a hurricane, tornado or flood.

Shope would call it God’s work even if it weren’t affiliated with the Lutheran church. “If you want to have a good feeling,” he says, “you go out and help someone who didn’t have a chance, who had given up on life and just quit.”

Lutheran churches, in varying degrees, call upon their members to demonstrate their faith, in words, actions and deeds. For Shope and Zotti, melding their religious beliefs with their work and family lives is as natural as breathing. To live is to serve, they agree, and to serve is to do God’s bidding.

Called to Serve
Late middle age might seem an ideal time to volunteer, but the couple is still highly engaged in the careers that they’ve spent years building. Zotti, 59, a former college professor of public-health nursing, now is a lead scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and works on HIV and reproductive-health services, both in the United States and for refugee women internationally.

Shope, who gave up his career to accompany Zotti to Georgia, now has a one-year, full-time grant to coordinate disaster relief in a five-state region for Lutheran Disaster Response, a national organization.

Each has children from a previous marriage who are grown and gone. Still, their children don’t always appreciate the time that Zotti and Shope devote to their various projects: the All Things New Ministry for disaster relief, which they cofounded, and their work with Camp Noah, created by Lutheran Social Services of Minnesota for children who have survived a natural disaster.

“We can’t not do it,” Zotti explains. “You can be dreadfully busy entertaining yourself or fixing up your house or taking kids to activities. But there’s something really special about ministering to someone else. It’s very humbling.”

Shope and Zotti maintain a tight focus to their priorities. They are clear about what comes first in their lives, what needs to get done and what can be ignored. In that way, they’ve escaped the “tightening compression of time” that afflicts many people.

“We try to put more into 24 hours than we ever have before,” says the Rev. Peter Marty, who serves St. Paul Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa, “You can joke about technology, but look at what e-mail has done to your life. We’re living under greater amounts of stress. That clearly affects people’s spirituality.”

New Opportunities
Middle age often is a time of deeper kinship with the church, a richer relationship with God’s teachings and a stronger appreciation of the blessings He bestows. By midlife, people have sustained some of life’s major blows, whether the death of a loved one, the loss of a job or a health crisis.

Irma Longworth, 54, survived a brain tumor and a near-death experience in 1989, when she was raising two small children. A “miracle” case by any doctor’s measure, Longworth now speaks to medical students, church groups—anyone who wants to hear her story and her proclamation that the best physicians “start healing from within.”

Like Zotti and Shope, Longworth feels she is an agent of the Lord. The question of “integrating” her faith and life is academic. She is called to do it and humbled that she can. “You can pretend to be an angel in a church,” says Longworth, who lives outside of Los Angeles. “But it’s outside the church where we become the church. You need to live a true life of God.”

The Rev. Stephen Hower establishes a fourfold covenant with his parishioners at St. John Lutheran Church in Ellisville, Missouri. Their mutual charge is to “grow in worship and grow in Bible study,” he says, but also “to grow in sacrificial living” and “to grow in intentional relationships with believers and non-believers.” Hower calls that “the application side.”

“We talk about doing life together,” he explains. “We fight as hard as we can against the concept of spectator Christianity, that people only have a weekend experience.”

Asked if his parishioners have an obligation to witness their faith, the Rev. Donald Patterson laughs. “The Gospel is freedom, and you share out of joy, not out of guilt,” says Patterson, who serves Holy Word Lutheran Church in Austin, Texas. “The word ‘obligation’ doesn’t go far with our members. It makes them sad. A sad Christian is not going to witness very well.”

Amy Gage is a freelance writer in Northfield, Minnesota. She writes the “Seeker’s Diary” column for the “Faith and Values” section of the Minneapolis StarTribune.

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