Will you leave completed symbols on the earth? Now that you’ve found your symbolic lands, how to cultivate and complete them. That’s the second half of life’s mandate. The second half of life is about that symbolic efficiency. You know what you have to tend, now you can make it fruitful—finish the lines of your poem!

As you go into the 2nd half of life, you want to refine what you already have. You want to make each symbol more complete!!! Stewarding your symbols becomes a pleasure. When young, you found them, now to edit refine and share them. To tell the whole story. To collaborate in completing your testimony—His story of your life! This becomes your passion.

To complete your symbols on earth, becomes the task of the second half of life. The symbols you searched to find and conquer in the first half of life—the true images of self or yourself, can now be contoured completed filled in, outlined, shared. The story can be told! The second half of life is to tell the whole story well. To complete the symbols in Peace. No longer are you in competition, so you can complete your symbols in peace. Walk them out!

I’ve begun to be less threatened if I don’t make it to the next next…it is rather completing the symbols I have. So my house in Austin, my friends and neighborhood in San Fran, and my loft in Antwerp. These three for now need to be polished off maintained, and made spiritually sustainable-that is reproductive.

 They are on my lands, and they are part of completing the symbols I am meant to tend. This is the stage as in the book of Joshua of cultivating and making fruitful. You have already crossed the Jordan, conquered occupied and possessed the lands which are yours, now you move on to cultivation. You see the pleasant lines of your inheritance, now you can partner with God in making it fruitful. This requires wisdom, and has new satisfactions.

Tending symbols. The symbols of your life have already been birthed and grown up, now, it’s time to interpret them so they can be given to others as a whole story. That’s part of the second half of life.

Each space and project is symbolic of course, or has a symbolic dimension. You start being less concerned with what is not yours to tend also, as you get older. More working only on your own fields. Mine include many leaders and people, but also spaces themselves and cities. I like stewarding the symbolic aspect of my life.

When I leave, i would like to have more complete symbols so that it’s readable.

I’m sure architects love leaving buildings! I would like to leave traces, but very clear ones, which point to His Kingdom realm.

Jesus finished His symbols! And was a fulfillment of many beginnings of the images in the Old Testament—the bread, the wine, the temple etc…Jesus fulfilled these images, completed the symbols in Himself.

That is part of the mission of the second half of life, to complete your symbols.

In the second half of life, we get to interpret ourselves! We get to finish editing and refining what we discovered in the first half of life. The second half of life is redaction, editing towards fullness. It is enjoying completing the symbols you will leave on earth.

If Jesus had not completed His story, we would all be in trouble. He instead was able to say, “It is finished.” Let us be similar in completing our tales, completing our symbols.

We are no longer just inventing ourselves-which is really discovering who we are. Now, we know, and can refine and offer this piece of art out to others, as a sign of love and thanks to God for making us, and telling His Story through ours.