Maybe you forgot about it. But we didn’t.

Last fall, we invited our readers to take a quick online survey so we could get to know a bit more about you. Nearly 90 of you took some time to introduce yourselves to us. Here’s a bit about what we heard from you:

Nearly half of our survey respondents were from women ages 50-59. The other half was pretty evenly distributed among those in younger and older age groups. More than 40% are involved in volunteer roles in their churches or communities; a strong majority are working at least part-time.

We asked how respondents would describe their current life stage, and then offered a variety of descriptors ranging from nostalgic to worried to confident. The top three vote-getters were “grateful”, “hopeful”, and “optimistic”, though words like “uncertain” and “nostalgic” garnered significant feedback, too. We also gave respondents the opportunity to add their own descriptions to our list. Some of those adjectives included words like “undervalued”, “overwhelmed”, “unsteady”, and “tired”.

We wanted to know what kind of challenges our readers were facing right now. They included:

• Financial: retirement planning, weariness over constant worry and sense of scarcity
• Family: caregiving issues, sandwich generation challenges, young adult children struggling to launch, prodigals, grandchildren living in other states
• Relational: Changing friendships, social isolation, loneliness
• Health: weight gain, diabetes, autoimmune conditions, memory loss
• Identity: Who am I now?
• Vocation: workplace stress, career change, uncertainty about what to do with the remaining years of life
• Faith: Spiritual weariness, regret, feeling invisible at church, shifts in focus and ministry

Finally, we asked about some topics you’d like to see us cover in this space. They included:

• Theology
• Grief
• Making new friends, keeping the old
• Church involvement: It seems leaders don’t know what to do with us. There has to be more than helping in children’s ministry or facilitating prettily-packaged women’s Bible studies.
• Church involvement:
• Sex at midlife when one partner has poor health and/or a diminishing sex drive
• Pressing on
• How to look back at your life
• How to be passionate about Jesus after hearing it all before
• Being single when it seems that the church is all about marriage/family
• Race
• Blended family grandparenting, long distance grandparenting

It is our goal at this website to

• Cultivate frank conversation about transitions in our faith, culture, church, relationships, vocation, and bodies
• Inspire intergenerational relationship and invite older women out of the shadows
• Encourage new paths, purpose, and calling in the lives of people over 50
• Invite those of other beliefs and stages of life to engage with us