The Sunset Season: Aging with Grace, Joy and Purpose

I was sitting on a terrace just outside of Cabo San Lucas watching the sun melt into the Pacific Ocean. That’s when it hit me: I’m watching the sunset of my own life.

Not necessarily the final minutes. But the final season.

I’d survived a heart attack. Built a coaching practice. Sold a few companies. Raised a family. 

But nobody had ever taught me how to grow old. 

Billy Graham said the same thing at eighty-seven, “All my life I’ve been taught how to die, but no one ever taught me how to grow old.” Standing on that terrace, I knew exactly what he meant.

The trigger arrived a few years earlier. One morning in 2021, sitting in my reading chair scrolling through a curated newsletter, I hit a single sentence that stopped me cold:

As most people age, they become an exaggerated version of their negative self.

I read it three times. Then I looked around at my friends, all smart, successful, faithful people in their sixties. And I saw it. His short fuse that was manageable at forty was getting shorter at sixty-five. Her controlling tendencies were tightening with age. Their fear was deepening. All this, even among people of deep, genuine faith.

Then I turned the lens on myself. I was so convicted I almost went on a preemptive apology tour.

Instead, I went on a research quest. And the more I dug in, the more I realized this wasn’t just a personal crisis. It was a generational one.

Nearly 69 million baby boomers are alive in America today. Roughly 10,000 Americans retire every single day. A trillion-dollar longevity industry is flooding them with supplements, biohacks, and cold plunges… all promising to solve the problem of aging. Investments in longevity-related industries more than doubled to $8.5 billion in 2024. 

Simply put, the marketplace sees aging as a problem to be solved.

But what if aging was never a problem to begin with? What if it was a season to navigate? 

Modern culture frames aging with three load-bearing walls: 1) Chase your passions. 2) Protect your money. 3) Deny your mortality. It’s all physical problem-solving. And the advice isn’t all bad: eat well, exercise, invest wisely. 

But it’s solving for X when the real issue is Y. Nobody’s trying to solve a sunset. We’re supposed to experience it.

I spent a couple of  years reading over sixty books, studying seventy-five passages of Scripture, interviewing physicians, psychologists, and theologians. I dug into the Harvard Study of Adult Development. I revisited a twenty-five-year-old study I’d done on King David and found that his sunset season suddenly felt far more relevant than it had a quarter century earlier. 

Everything pointed to one conclusion: The modern cultural approach to aging well is deeply and fundamentally flawed.

What I found instead is that aging isn’t a slow fade. It’s a sacred awakening. God has a calling for this season. The calling isn’t to a rocking chair or a bucket list. It’s a calling built on three things: Grace, Joy and Purpose.

Grace anchors us to the divine. Joy makes our hope contagious. Purpose moves us forward.

I saw it in my mother, who is ninety five. She has every reason to be miserable. Pain, loss, limitations. But she is one of the most joyful people I know. She prays for joy every single day. And she chooses joy everyday. And everyone around her is changed by it.

I saw it in two of my mentors, Peb Jackson and Joe Ritchie, who died in their late seventies. At their funerals, hundreds of people described how Peb and Joe poured into them right up to the end. They modeled what it looks like to finish well, and it changed everyone around them.

That’s why I wrote The Sunset Season: Aging with Grace, Joy, and Purpose. Not a collection of hacks and tips, but a gospel-informed framework for the biggest season most of us never planned for. If you’re in a small group at church, a Sunday School class, or a circle of friends navigating this season together, get ten or fifteen copies and read it side by side. These are conversations we need to have, and we need to have them together.

The sun is setting. But the sunset isn’t the end of the story. It’s the most beautiful part of the day, if you know how to watch it.

The Sunset Season: Aging with Grace, Joy, and Purpose is available today! 

Purchase or learn more at www.sunsetseasonbook.com.

P.S. – We’re offering a launch week bulk discount valid through July 2. If you order five or more copies, you’ll get 20% off automatically at checkout.

P.P.S. – If you or someone you know would benefit from a brief conversation about partnership options – how to get the book into the hands of people in their sunset season – schedule a quick call with Phil on our team at Cornerstone to explore partnership options.